In compliance with my usual practice, I send you this letter, containing a
trifling biographical sketch, and an offer of my literary services. I don't
suppose you will accept them, treating me as for forty-three years past all
the journals of this empire have done; for I have offered my contributions
to them all--all. It was in the year 1798, that escaping from a French
prison (that of Toulon, where I had been condemned to the hulks for
forgery)--I say, from a French prison, but to find myself incarcerated in
an English dungeon (fraudulent bankruptcy, implicated in swindling
transactions, falsification of accounts, and contempt of court), I began to
amuse my hours of imprisonment by literary composition.
I sent in that year my "Apology for the Corsican," relative to die murder
of Captain Wright, to the late Mr. Perry, of the _Morning Chronicle_,
preparing an answer to the same in the _Times_ journal; but as the apology
was not accepted (though the argument of it was quite clear, and much to my
credit), so neither was the answer received--a sublime piece, Mr. PUNCH, an
unanswerable answer.
In the year 1799, I made an attempt on the journal of the late Reverend Mr.
Thomas Hill, then fast sinking in years; but he had ill-treated my father,
pursuing him before Mr. Justice Fielding for robbing him of a snuff-box, in
the year 1740; and he continued his resentment towards my father's
unoffending son. I was cruelly rebuffed by Mr. Hill, as indeed I have been
by every other newspaper proprietor.
No; there is not a single periodical print which has appeared for
forty-three years since, to which I did not make some application. I have
by me essays and fugitive pieces in fourteen trunks, seven carpet bags of
trifles in verse, and a portmanteau with best part of an epic poem, which
it does not become me to praise. I have no less than four hundred and
ninety-five acts of dramatic composition, which have been rejected even by
the Syncretic Association.
Such is the set that for forty-three years has been made against a man of
genius by an envious literary world! Are you going to follow in its wake?
Ha, ha, ha! no less than seven thousand three hundred times (the exact
number of my applications) have I asked that question. Think well before
you reject me, Mr. PUNCH--think well, and at least listen to what I have to
say.
It is this: I am not wishing any longer to come forward with tragedies,
epics, essays, or original compositions. I am old now--morose in temper,
troubled with poverty, jaundice, imprisonment, and habitual indigestion. I
hate everybody, and, with the exception of gin-and-water, everything. I
know every language, both in the known and unknown worlds; I am profoundly
ignorant of history, or indeed of any other useful science, but have a
smattering of all. I am excellently qualified to judge and lash the vices
of the age, having experienced, I may almost say, every one of them in my
own person. The immortal and immoral Goethe, that celebrated sage of
Germany, has made exactly the same confession.