This is like to be an expensive journey; but if I can sell an early copy of the work to a French translator, it should bring me home.

Thank God, little Johnnie Hoo, as he calls himself, is looking well, though the poor dear child is kept always in a prostrate posture.

October 18.—­I take up again my remarks on imitators.  I am sure I mean the gentlemen no wrong by calling them so, and heartily wish they had followed a better model; but it serves to show me veluti in speculo my own errors, or, if you will, those of the style.  One advantage, I think, I still have over all of them.  They may do their fooling with better grace; but I, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, do it more natural.[362] They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections to get their knowledge; I write because I have long since read such works, and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for.  This leads to a dragging-in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events which do not affect its progress.  Perhaps I have sinned in this way myself; indeed, I am but too conscious of having considered the plot only as what Bayes[363] calls the means of bringing in fine things; so that in respect to the descriptions, it resembled the string of the showman’s box, which he pulls to show in succession Kings, Queens, the Battle of Waterloo, Bonaparte at Saint Helena, Newmarket Races, and White-headed Bob floored by Jemmy from town.  All this I may have done, but I have repented of it; and in my better efforts, while I conducted my story through the agency of historical personages, and by connecting it with historical incidents, I have endeavoured to weave them pretty closely together, and in future I will study this more.  Must not let the background eclipse the principal figures—­the frame overpower the picture.

Another thing in my favour is, that my contemporaries steal too openly.  Mr. Smith has inserted in Brambletye House whole pages from Defoe’s Fire and Plague of London.

    “Steal! foh! a fico for the phrase—­
    Convey, the wise it call!"[364]

When I convey an incident or so, I am at as much pains to avoid detection as if the offence could be indicted in literal fact at the Old Bailey.

But leaving this, hard pressed as I am by these imitators, who must put the thing out of fashion at last, I consider, like a fox at his last shifts, whether there be a way to dodge them, some new device to throw them off, and have a mile or two of free ground, while I have legs and wind left to use it.  There is one way to give novelty:  to depend for success on the interest of a well-contrived story.  But woe’s me! that requires thought, consideration—­the writing out a regular plan or plot—­above all the adhering to one—­which I never can do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble; and yet to make the world stare, and gain a new march ahead of them all!!!  Well, something we still will do.