manufacture of
wooden nutmegs, horn gun-flints, and cuckoo-clocks, and being always too
busy for anything better than dicker and truck in a small way,--the
haberdashery of nations,--yet, after all, it might be said of us that we
were capital imitators, or thieves and counterfeiters, so that our
Brockden Brown was at least the American Godwin,--our Cooper, the
American Scott,--our Irving, just flowering in the "Sketch-Book," the
American Goldsmith or Addison,--and our Sigourney, the American Hemans.

That my blood boiled in my veins, whenever I thought of this, I must
acknowledge; and within three weeks, I believe, I was on my way to
London, with a novel in the rough, which, after undergoing many
transformations, appeared in that city as "Brother Jonathan,"--the
manuscript of "Otho, a Tragedy," wholly recast and rewritten, with
"_exit omnes_," and other monstrous Latin blunders corrected, and, on
the whole, very much as it afterwards appeared in "The Yankee,"--and
heaps of letters, which I could not well afford to deliver, and
therefore threw into the fire: leaving my law business to take care of
itself, somewhat after the fashion of that Revolutionary volunteer, "Old
Put," who, when he heard the sound of a trumpet and knew the lists were
opened, left his plough in the furrow, and the cattle standing in the
field. My law-library, and the building I occupied, I passed over to the
care of a young man of great promise, just entering the profession, who
not only burned up my supply of wood for the year, but failed to pay the
rent, and then took the liberty of dying suddenly, poor fellow! without
a word of notice to my landlord: so that I was fairly adrift.

On arriving in London, I took lodgings in Warwick Street, Pall Mall,
introduced to the landlady by Leslie the painter, and occupying the very
chambers where Washington Irving was delivered of the "Sketch-Book": my
windows on the first floor looking out on the back entrance of Carlton
House, by which the Princess Charlotte had escaped not long before, when
she ran away from her father, as my landlady took care to inform me;
adding, that, from the very window where we stood, she had seen the
little madcap get into the carriage--a common hack, by the way--and go
off at full speed.

I lost no time in looking about me, and preparing for a literary
campaign, where I might forage upon the enemy, beat up his quarters when
I chose, and, if possible, get possession of a battery