9 Jan., 1823.

“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 had 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 for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a Counting House, all agreeing they had rather have been Taylors, Weavers, what not? rather than the things they were.  I have known some starved, some to go mad, one clear friend literally dying in a workhouse.  You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set those booksellers are.  Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book drudgery, what he has found them.  O 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 book-seller’s dependent, 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.  I contend, that a Bookseller has a relative honesty towards Authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world.  B[aldwin], who first engag’d me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying applials), yet how the Knave fawned while I was of service to him!  Yet I dare say the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, &c.  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. 6 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