It is needless to enumerate the different subjects which one after another engaged me.  Mathematics, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, were each begun, and each in turn given up in a passion of love and disgust.

It is the fate of all inordinate passions to meet their extremes; so was it with mine.  Could I have pursued any of these studies with moderation, I might have been to this day, perhaps, both learned and happy.  But I could be moderate in nothing.  Not content with being employed, I must always be busy; and business, as every one knows, if long continued, must end in fatigue, and fatigue in disgust, and disgust in change, if that be practicable,—­which unfortunately was my case.

The restlessness occasioned by these half-finished studies brought on a severe fit of self-examination.  Why is it, I asked myself, that these learned works, which have each furnished their authors with sufficient excitement to effect their completion, should thus weary me before I get midway into them?  It is plain enough.  As a reader I am merely a recipient, but the composer is an active agent; a vast difference!  And now I can account for the singular pleasure, which a certain bad poet of my acquaintance always took in inflicting his verses on every one who would listen to him; each perusal being but a sort of mental echo of the original bliss of composition.  I will set about writing immediately.

Having, time out of mind, heard the epithet great coupled with Historians, it was that, I believe, inclined me to write a history.  I chose my subject, and began collating, and transcribing, night and day, as if I had not another hour to live; and on I went with the industry of a steam-engine; when it one day occurred to me, that, though I had been laboring for months, I had not yet had occasion for one original thought.  Pshaw! said I, ’t is only making new clothes out of old ones.  I will have nothing more to do with history.

As it is natural for a mind suddenly disgusted with mechanic toil to seek relief from its opposite, it can easily be imagined that my next resource was Poetry.  Every one rhymes now-a-days, and so can I. Shall I write an Epic, or a Tragedy, or a Metrical Romance?  Epics are out of fashion; even Homer and Virgil would hardly be read in our time, but that people are unwilling to admit their schooling to have been thrown away.  As to Tragedy, I am a modern, and it is a settled thing that no modern can write a tragedy; so I must not attempt that.  Then for Metrical Romances,—­why, they are now manufactured; and, as the Edinburgh Review says, may be “imported” by us “in bales.”  I will bind myself to no particular class, but give free play to my imagination.  With this resolution I went to bed, as one going to be inspired.  The morning came; I ate my breakfast, threw up the window, and placed myself in my elbow-chair before it.  An hour passed, and nothing occurred to me.  But this I ascribed to a fit of laughter