‘Yes,’ said my host, sighing, ’my name is so and so, and I am the author of so and so; it is more than probable that you have heard both of my name and works.  I will not detain you much longer with my history; the night is advancing, and the storm appears to be upon the increase.  My life since the period of my becoming an author may be summed briefly as an almost uninterrupted series of doubts, anxieties, and trepidations.  I see clearly that it is not good to love anything immoderately in this world, but it has been my misfortune to love immoderately everything on which I have set my heart.  This is not good, I repeat—­but where is the remedy?  The ancients were always in the habit of saying, “Practise moderation,” but the ancients appear to have considered only one portion of the subject.  It is very possible to practise moderation in some things, in drink and the like—­to restrain the appetites—­but can a man restrain the affections of his mind, and tell them, so far you shall go, and no farther?  Alas, no! for the mind is a subtle principle, and cannot be confined.  The winds may be imprisoned; Homer says that Odysseus carried certain winds in his ship, confined in leathern bags, but Homer never speaks of confining the affections.  It were but right that those who exhort us against inordinate affections, and setting our hearts too much upon the world and its vanities, would tell us how to avoid doing so.

’I need scarcely tell you that no sooner did I become an author than I gave myself up immoderately to my vocation.  It became my idol, and, as a necessary consequence, it has proved a source of misery and disquietude to me, instead of pleasure and blessing.  I had trouble enough in writing my first work, and I was not long in discovering that it was one thing to write a stirring and spirited address to a set of county electors, and another widely different to produce a work at all calculated to make an impression upon the great world.  I felt, however, that I was in my proper sphere, and by dint of unwearied diligence and exertion I succeeded in evolving from the depths of my agitated breast a work which, though it did not exactly please me, I thought would serve to make an experiment upon the public; so I laid it before the public, and the reception which it met with was far beyond my wildest expectations.  The public were delighted with it, but what were my feelings?  Anything, alas! but those of delight.  No sooner did the public express its satisfaction at the result of my endeavours, than my perverse imagination began to conceive a thousand chimerical doubts; forthwith I sat down to analyse it; and my worst enemy, and all people have their enemies, especially authors—­my worst enemy could not have discovered or sought to discover a tenth part of the faults which I, the author and creator of the unfortunate production, found or sought to find in it.  It has been said that love makes us blind to the faults of the loved object—­common