DEAR SIR,—­I quite understood.  With the generous view of doing me a good turn by giving me the almost inestimable advantage of advertising myself in Messrs. TOWERS & Co.’s widely-circulated Magazine, you propose to interview me, and receive from me such orally given information as you may require concerning my life, history, work, and everything about myself which, in your opinion, would interest the readers of this Magazine.  I quite appreciate all this.  You propose to write the article, and I’m to find you the materials for it.  Good.  I don’t venture to put any price on the admirable work which your talent will produce,—­that’s for you and your publishers to settle between you, and, as a matter of fact, it has been already settled, as you are in their employ.  But I can put a price on my own, and I do.  I collaborate with you in furnishing all the materials of which you are in need. Soit. For the use of my Pegasus, no matter what its breed, and, as it isn’t a gift-horse, but a hired one, you can examine its mouth and legs critically whenever you are going to mount and guide it at your own sweet will, I charge twenty guineas for the first hour, and ten for the second.  It may be dear, or it may be cheap.  That’s not my affair. C’est a laisser ou a prendre.

The Magazine in which the article is to appear is not given away with a pound of tea, or anything of that sort I presume, so that your strictly honourable and business-like firm of employers, and you also, Sir, in the regular course of your relations with them, intend making something out of me, more or less, but something, while I get nothing at all for my time, which is decidedly as valuable to me as, I presume, is yours to you.  What have your publishers ever done for me that I should give them my work for nothing?  Time is money; why should I make Messrs. TOWER, FONDLER & Co. a present of twenty pounds, or, for the matter of that, even ten shillings?  If I misapprehend the situation, and you are doing your work gratis and for the love of the thing, then that is your affair, not mine:  I’m glad to hear it, and regret my inability to join you in the luxury of giving away what it is an imperative necessity of my existence to sell at the best price I can.  Do you honestly imagine, Sir, that my literary position will be one farthing’s-worth improved by a memoir and a portrait of me appearing in your widely-circulated journal?  If you do, I don’t; and I prefer to be paid for my work, whether I dictate the material to a scribe, who is to serve it up in his own fashion, or whether I write it myself.  And now I come to consider it, I should be inclined to make an additional charge for not writing it myself, Not to take you and your worthy firm of employers by surprise, I will make out beforehand a supposititious bill, and then Messrs. TOWER & Co. can close with my offer or not, as they please.