M’Neile, who warmly praised them, and recommended their publication; but, regarding them as private and personal, I would not hear of it, and in fact it was nine years before they saw print; thus literally, though I meant it not then, exemplifying the Horatian advice, ‘nonumque premantur in annum.’  However, one day in August 1838, Mr. Stebbing, whose chapel, in the Hampstead Road I used to attend when living at Gothic Cottage, Regent’s Park, in my first years of marriage, visiting me and urging me to write something for the Athenaeum, which he was then editing, I was induced to show him these earliest essays; but I declined to give them to him, whereat he was angered; perhaps the rather in that I objected to piecemeal publication, possibly also casting some reproach (as the fashion of the day then was) upon magazine and journalistic literature generally.  That I made an enemy of him was evidenced by a spiteful little notice in the Athenaeum of April 21st (three months after my first series was published) stating that it was ’a book not likely to please beyond the circle of a few minds as eccentric as the author’s.’  The same false friend excluded me altogether from any notice in the Examiner wherein he had some literary influence.”  To this day these reviews have been my foes, which I regret.

“Still, Mr. Stebbing did me substantial good; he praised the idea as ’new, because a resuscitation of what was very old,’—­and as of my own origination in these latter days, and as a good vehicle for thoughts on many matters:  and he promised his valuable assistance to a young author’s fame,—­performing as above.  So, after a last interview with him at his house, wherein I conclusively refused him, I wrote my Preface at once, jotting down (as I recollect at the street corner post opposite Hampstead Road Chapel) on the back of an old letter my opening paragraph,—­

“’Thoughts that have tarried in my mind, and peopled its inner chambers,’ &c., &c.

“In ten weeks from that day I had my first series ready,—­supposing it then all I should ever write;—­the same assurance of a final end having been my delusion at the close of each of my four series.  My first publisher was Rickerby of Abchurch Lane, who produced a beautifully printed small folio volume with ornamental initials, and now very scarce:  it came to a second edition, but brought me no money,—­and the third edition failing to sell, it was in great part sent to America; where N.P.  Willis finding a copy, fancied the book that of some forgotten author of the Elizabethan era, and quoted it week after week in a periodical of his, The Home Journal, as such:  years afterwards, when he met me in London, he was scared to find that one whom he had thought dead three hundred years was still alive and juvenile and ruddy.