There was but one alternative left.  I determined to publish the poem myself; and to have my triumph over the booksellers, when it should become the fashion of the day.  I accordingly published the Pleasures of Melancholy and ruined myself.  Excepting the copies sent to the reviews, and to my friends in the country, not one, I believe, ever left the bookseller’s warehouse.  The printer’s bill drained my purse, and the only notice that was taken of my work was contained in the advertisements paid for by myself.

I could have borne all this, and have attributed it as usual to the mismanagement of the publisher, or the want of taste in the public:  and could have made the usual appeal to posterity, but my village friends would not let me rest in quiet.  They were picturing me to themselves feasting with the great, communing with the literary, and in the high course of fortune and renown.  Every little while, some one came to me with a letter of introduction from the village circle, recommending him to my attentions, and requesting that I would make him known in society; with a hint that an introduction to the house of a celebrated literary nobleman would be extremely agreeable.

I determined, therefore, to change my lodgings, drop my correspondence, and disappear altogether from the view of my village admirers.  Besides, I was anxious to make one more poetic attempt.  I was by no means disheartened by the failure of my first.  My poem was evidently too didactic.  The public was wise enough.  It no longer read for instruction.  “They want horrors, do they?” said I, “I’faith, then they shall have enough of them.”  So I looked out for some quiet retired place, where I might be out of reach of my friends, and have leisure to cook up some delectable dish of poetical “hell-broth.”

I had some difficulty in finding a place to my mind, when chance threw me in the way Of Canonbury Castle.  It is an ancient brick tower, hard by “merry Islington;” the remains of a hunting-seat of Queen Elizabeth, where she took the pleasures of the country, when the neighborhood was all woodland.  What gave it particular interest in my eyes, was the circumstance that it had been the residence of a poet.  It was here Goldsmith resided when he wrote his Deserted Village.  I was shown the very apartment.  It was a relique of the original style of the castle, with pannelled wainscots and gothic windows.  I was pleased with its air of antiquity, and with its having been the residence of poor Goldy.

“Goldsmith was a pretty poet,” said I to myself, “a very pretty poet; though rather of the old school.  He did not think and feel so strongly as is the fashion now-a-days; but had he lived in these times of hot hearts and hot heads, he would have written quite differently.”