is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.  I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge ——­’s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an O!  I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest.  I am weary of the world; life is weary of me.  My day is gone into twilight, and I don’t think it worth the expense of candles.  My wick hath a thief in it, but I can’t muster courage to snuff it.  I inhale suffocation; I can’t distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me.  ’Tis twelve o’clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection.  If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, ‘Will it?’ I have not volition enough left to dot my i’s, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorflelds, and they did not say when they’d come back again; my skull is a Grub Street attic to let—­not so much as a joint stool left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little, when their heads are off.  O for a vigorous fit of gout, colic, toothache,—­an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life—­the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death!  Did you ever have an obstinate cold,—­a six or seven weeks’ unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing?  Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse instead of better.  I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o’ nights, but do not find any visible amendment!...

It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by showing ’em in the town, finally closes.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

1778-1830

To Miss Sarah Stoddart

A love-letter

Tuesday night [Jan. 1808].

MY DEAR LOVE,

Above a week has passed, and I have received no letter—­not one of those letters ‘in which I live, or have no life at all’.  What is become of you?  Are you married, hearing that I was dead (for so it has been reported)?  Or are you gone into a nunnery?  Or are you fallen in love with some of the amorous heroes of Boccaccio?  Which of them is it?  Is it with Chynon, who was transformed from a clown