UPON looking into my mother’s marriage settlement, in order to satisfy
myself and reader in a point necessary to be cleared up, before we
could proceed any farther in this history;—I had the good fortune to
pop upon the very thing I wanted before I had read a day and a half
straight forwards,—it might have taken me up a month;—which shews
plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,—tho’ it be but
the history of _Jack Hickathrift_ or _Tom Thumb_, he knows no more than
his heels what lets and confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his
way,—or what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another, before
all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a
muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;——for instance, from
_Rome_ all the way to _Loretto_, without ever once turning his head
aside, either to the right hand or to the left,——he might venture to
foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;——but
the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the
least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to
make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways
avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually
soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at
than he can fly; he will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that:——All which both the man and his mule are quite
exempt from. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be
look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies,
which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of:——In
short there is no end of it;——for my own part, I declare I have been at
it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,—and am not
yet born:—I have just been able, and that’s all, to tell you _when_ it
happen’d, but not _how_;—so that you see the thing is yet far from
being accomplished.
These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no conception of when I
first set out;—but which, I am convinced now, will rather increase than
diminish as I advance,—have struck out a hint which I am resolved to
follow;——and that is,—not to be in a hurry;—but to go on leisurely,
writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year;——which, if I
am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable bargain with my
bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live.