Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.  The majority of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling.  Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire which may be seen over three counties.  If, during thirty years, the annoyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing when you are hurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a mass and endured at once, it would be misery equal to a public execution.  If, from the same space of time, all the little titillations of a man’s vanity were gathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure of being crowned would not perhaps be much greater.  If the equanimity of an ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will the equanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive of the race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the fine tissues of the nerves.  Literary composition is, I take it, with the exception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, the most exhausting to which a human being can apply himself.  Just consider the situation.  Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper, who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramples heedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise as Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morning to his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would be unmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declared that the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting from the censure of the meanest.  Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this!  Will such a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance?  Will he throw himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber is lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper?  When his harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks?  I fear not.  The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured.  And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient.  Thinking of these things, I do not wonder at Hazlitt’s spleen, at Charles Lamb’s punch, at Coleridge’s opium.  I think of the days spent in writing, and of the nights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is no refreshment.  I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; of Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances; of Southey sitting vacantly in his library,