“At last, I gave way before difficulty, and conceded the first step to the calamity which had stood front to front with me so long.  I left the neighbourhood where I was known, and assumed the name of a schoolfellow who had died.  For some time this succeeded; but the curse of my father’s death followed me, though I saw it not.  After various employments—­still, mind, the employments of a gentleman!—­had first supported, then failed me, I became an usher at a school.  It was there that my false name was detected, and my identity discovered again—­I never knew through whom.  The exposure was effected by some enemy, anonymously.  For several days, I thought everybody in the school treated me in an altered way.  The cause came out, first in whispers, then in reckless jests, while I was taking care of the boys in the playground.  In the fury of the moment I struck one of the most insolent, and the eldest of them, and hurt him rather seriously.  The parents heard of it, and threatened me with prosecution; the whole neighbourhood was aroused.  I had to leave my situation secretly, by night, or the mob would have pelted the felon’s son out of the parish.

“I went back to London, bearing another assumed name; and tried, as a last resource to save me from starvation, the resource of writing.  I served my apprenticeship to literature as a hack-author of the lowest degree.  Knowing I had talents which might be turned to account, I tried to vindicate them by writing an original work.  But my experience of the world had made me unfit to dress my thoughts in popular costume:  I could only tell bitter truths bitterly; I exposed licenced hypocrisies too openly; I saw the vicious side of many respectabilities, and said I saw it—­in short, I called things by their right names; and no publisher would treat with me.  So I stuck to my low task-work; my penny-a lining in third-class newspapers; my translating from Frenchmen and Germans, and plagiarising from dead authors, to supply the raw material for bookmongering by more accomplished bookmongers than I. In this life, there was one advantage which compensated for much misery and meanness, and bitter, biting disappointment:  I could keep my identity securely concealed.  Character was of no consequence to me; nobody cared to know who I was, or to inquire what I had been—­the gallows-mark was smoothed out at last!

“While I was living thus on the offal of literature, I met with a woman of good birth, and fair fortune, whose sympathies or whose curiosity I happened to interest.  She and her father and mother received me favourably, as a gentleman who had known better days, and an author whom the public had undeservedly neglected.  How I managed to gain their confidence and esteem, without alluding to my parentage, it is not worth while to stop to describe.  That I did so you will easily imagine, when I tell you that the woman to whom I refer, consented, with her father’s full approval, to become my wife.