love does, perhaps—­the love of a father to his child, or that of a lover to his mistress, but not the inordinate love of an author to his works, at least not the love which one like myself bears to his works:  to be brief, I discovered a thousand faults in my work, which neither public nor critics discovered.  However, I was beginning to get over this misery, and to forgive my work all its imperfections, when—­and I shake when I mention it—­the same kind of idea which perplexed me with regard to the hawks and the gypsy pony rushed into my mind, and I forthwith commenced touching the objects around me, in order to baffle the evil chance, as you call it; it was neither more nor less than a doubt of the legality of my claim to the thoughts, expressions, and situations contained in the book; that is, to all that constituted the book.  How did I get them?  How did they come into my mind?  Did I invent them?  Did they originate with myself?  Are they my own, or are they some other body’s?  You see into what difficulty I had got; I won’t trouble you by relating all that I endured at that time, but will merely say that after eating my own heart, as the Italians say, and touching every object that came in my way for six months, I at length flung my book, I mean the copy of it which I possessed, into the fire, and began another.

’But it was all in vain; I laboured at this other, finished it, and gave it to the world; and no sooner had I done so, than the same thought was busy in my brain, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise have derived from my work.  How did I get all the matter which composed it?  Out of my own mind, unquestionably; but how did it come there—­was it the indigenous growth of the mind?  And then I would sit down and ponder over the various scenes and adventures in my book, endeavouring to ascertain how I came originally to devise them, and by dint of reflecting I remembered that to a single word in conversation, or some simple accident in a street or on a road, I was indebted for some of the happiest portions of my work; they were but tiny seeds, it is true, which in the soil of my imagination had subsequently become stately trees, but I reflected that without them no stately trees would have been produced, and that, consequently, only a part in the merit of these compositions which charmed the world—­for the did charm the world—­was due to myself.  Thus, a dead fly was in my phial, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise have derived from the result of my brain-sweat.  “How hard!” I would exclaim, looking up to the sky, “how hard!  I am like Virgil’s sheep, bearing fleeces not for themselves.”  But, not to tire you, it fared with my second work as it did with my first; I flung it aside, and, in order to forget it, I began a third, on which I am now occupied; but the difficulty of writing it is immense, my extreme desire to be original sadly cramping the powers of my mind; my fastidiousness