might please him to do so; that I had nothing else at the time to depend on for my family; that I was in very bad health, never writing a page that did not put my nerves into a state of excessive sensibility, starting at every sound; and that whenever I sent the copy up to London for payment, which I did every Saturday, I always expected, till I got a good way into the work, that he would send me word he had had enough. I waxed and waned in spirits accordingly, as the weeks opened and terminated; now being as full of them as my hero Sir Ralph, and now as much otherwise as his friend Sir Philip Herne; and these two extremes of mirth and melancholy, and the analogous thoughts which they fed, made a strange kind of harmony with the characters themselves; which characters, by the way, were wholly fictitious, and probably suggested by the circumstance. Merry or melancholy, my nerves equally suffered by the tensity occasioned them in composition. I could never (and I seldom ever could, or can) write a few hundred words without a certain degree of emotion, which in a little while suspends the breath, then produces a flushing in the face, and, if persevered in, makes me wake up, when I have finished, in a sort of surprise at the objects around me, and a necessity of composing myself by patience and exercise. When the health is at its worst, a dread is thus apt to be produced at the idea of recommencing; and work is delayed, only to aggravate the result. I have often tried, and sometimes been forced to write only a very little while at a time, and so escape the accumulation of excitement; but it is very difficult to do this; for you forget the intention in the excitement itself; and when you call it to mind, you continue writing, in the hope of concluding the task for the day. A few months ago, when I had occasion to look at Sir Ralph Esher again, after some lapse of time, I was not a little pleased to find how glibly and at their ease the words appeared to run on, as though I had suffered no more in writing it than Sir Ralph himself. But thus it is with authors who are in earnest. The propriety of what they are saying becomes a matter of as much nervous interest to them, as any other exciting cause; and I believe, that if a writer of this kind were summoned away from his work to be

taken to the scaffold, he would not willingly leave his last sentence in erroneous condition.

The reader may be surprised to hear, after these remarks, that what I write with the greatest composure is verses. He may smile, and say that he does not wonder, since the more art the less nature, or the more artificiality the less earnestness. But it is not that; it is that I write verses only when I most like to write; that I write them slowly, with loving recurrence, and that the musical form is a perpetual solace and refreshment. The earnestness is not the less. In one respect it is greater, for it is more concentrated. It is forced, by a sweet necessity, to say more things in less compass. But then the necessity is sweet. The mode, and the sense of being able to meet its requirements, in however comparative a degree, are more than a sustainment: they are a charm. This is the reason why poetry, not of the highest order, is sometimes found so acceptable. The author feels so much happiness in his task, that he cannot but convey happiness to his reader.

CHAPTER XXIV.

LITERARY PROJECTS.

WE left Epsom to return to the neighbourhood of London, which was ever the natural abiding-place of men of letters, till railroads enlarged their bounds. We found a house in a sequestered corner of Old Brompton, and a landlord in the person of my friend Charles Knight, with whom an intercourse commenced, which I believe has been a pleasure on both sides. I am sure it has been a good to myself. If I had not a reverence of a peculiar sort for the inevitable past, I could wish that I had begun writing for Mr. Knight immediately, instead of attempting to set up another periodical work of my own, without either means to promulgate it, or health to render the failure of little consequence. I speak of a literary and theatrical paper called the Tatler, set up in 1830. It was a very little work, consisting but of four folio pages; but it was a daily publication: I did it all myself, except when too ill;

and illness seldom hindered me either from supplying the review of a book, going every night to the play, or writing the notice of the play the same night at the printing-office. The consequence was, that the work, slight as it looked, nearly killed me; for it never prospered beyond the coterie of playgoing readers, to whom it was almost exclusively known; and I was sensible of becoming weaker and poorer every day. When I came home at night, often at morning, I used to feel as if I could hardly speak; and for a year and a half afterwards, a certain grain of fatigue seemed to pervade my limbs, which I thought would never go off. Such, nevertheless, is a habit of the mind, if it but be cultivated, that my spirits never seemed better, nor did I ever write theatricals so well, as in the pages of this most unremunerating speculation.

I had attempted, just before, to set up a little work called Chat of the Week; which was to talk, without scandal, of anything worth public notice. The Government put a stop to this speculation by insisting that it should have a stamp; which I could not afford. I was very angry, and tilted against governments, and aristocracies, and kings and princes in general; always excepting King William, for whom I had regard as a reformer, and Louis Philippe, whom I fancied to be a philosopher. I also got out of patience with my old antagonists the Tories, to whom I resolved to give as good as they brought; and I did so, and stopped every new assailant. A daily paper, however small, is a weapon that gives an immense advantage; you can make your attacks in it so often. However, I always ceased as soon as my antagonists did.

In a year or two after the cessation of the Tatler [i. e. in 1833], my collected verses were published by subscription; and as a reaction by this time had taken place in favour of political and other progress, and the honest portion of its opponents had not been unwilling to discover the honesty of those with whom they differed, a very handsome list of subscribers appeared in the Times newspaper, comprising names of all shades of opinion, some of my sharpest personal antagonists not excepted.

In this edition of my Poetical Works is to be found the only printed copy of a poem, the title of which (The Gentle

Armour) has been a puzzle for guessers. It originated in curious notions of delicacy. The poem is founded on one of the French fabliaux, Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise. It is the story of a knight, who, to free himself from the imputation of cowardice, fights against three other knights in no stouter armour than a lady's garment thus indicated. The late Mr. Way, who first introduced the story to the British public, and who was as respectable and conventional a gentleman, I believe, in every point of view, as could be desired, had no hesitation, some years ago, in rendering the French title of the poem by its (then) corresponding English words, The Three Knights and the Smock; but so rapid are the changes that take place in people's notions of what is decorous, that not only has the word "smock" (of which it was impossible to see the indelicacy, till people were determined to find it) been displaced since that time by the word "shift;" but even that harmless expression for the act of changing one garment for another, has been set aside in favour of the French word "chemise ;" and at length not even this word, it seems, is to be mentioned, nor the garment itself alluded to, by any decent writer! Such, at least, appears to have been the dictum of some customer, or customers, of the bookseller who published the poem. The title was altered to please these gentlemen; and in a subsequent edition of the Works, the poem itself was withdrawn from their virgin eyes.

The terrible original title was the Battle of the Shift; and a more truly delicate story, I will venture to affirm, never was written. Charles Lamb thought the new title unworthy of its refinement, "because it seemed ashamed of the right one." He preferred the honest old word. But this was the author of Rosamond Gray.

We had found that the clay soil of St. John's Wood did not agree with us. Or, perhaps, it was only the melancholy state of our fortune: for the New Road, to which we again returned, agreed with us as little. It was there that I thought I should have died, in consequence of the long fatigue which succeeded the working of the Tatler.

While in this quarter I received an invitation to write in the new evening paper called The True Sun. I did so; but

nothing of what I wrote has survived, I believe; nor can I meet with the paper anywhere, to ascertain. Perhaps an essay or two originated in its pages, to which I cannot trace it. I was obliged for some time to be carried every morning to the True Sun office in a hackney-coach. I there became intimate with Laman Blanchard, whose death [about ten years back] was such a grief and astonishment to his friends. They had associated anything but such end with his witty, joyous, loving, and beloved nature. But the watch was over-wound, and it ran suddenly down. What bright eyes he had! and what a kindly smile! How happy he looked when he thought you were happy; or when he was admiring somebody; or relating some happy story! If suicide, bad as it often is, and full of recklessness and resentment, had not been rescued from indiscriminate opprobrium, Laman Blanchard alone should have rescued it. I never think of him without feeling additional scorn for the hell of the scorner Dante, who has put all suicides into his truly infernal regions, both those who were unjust to others, and those who were unjust only to themselves.*

From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family removed to a corner in Chelsea, where the air of the neighbouring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of the "nothoroughfare" so full of repose, that although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in the silence. I got to like the very cries in the street, for making me the more aware of it by the contrast. I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others. Nor is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those masters were of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial words to music in their glees and catches. The primitive cries of cowslips, primroses, and hot cross-buns seemed never to have quitted this sequestered

See the speech of the good Piero delle Vigne, who was driven to kill himself by the envy of those that hated him for fidelity to his master.-Inferno, canto xiii.