'Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support,
beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you'!!!
Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock,
slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory
minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a
century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are
Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto
you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp.
I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others
envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they
had rather have been tailors, weavers--what not? rather than the
things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear
friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious,
dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single
case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found
them. Oh, you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting
by authorship! 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or
mine; but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's
dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale, and breasts of
mutton, _to change your_ FREE THOUGHTS _and_ VOLUNTARY NUMBERS _for
ungracious_ TASK-WORK. Those fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to
be, that contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the
credit (a jeweller or silversmith for instance,) and the journeyman,
who really does the fine work, is in the background: in _our_ work
the world gives all the credit to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_
journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress
us, and would wring the blood of us out, to put another sixpence in
their mechanic pouches!...
Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you. Trust not to the
public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy
_personage_ cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing
good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon
the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B.B., in the
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p.m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.