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
love does, perhaps--the love of a father to his child, or that of a lover
to his mistress, but not the inordinate love of an author to his works,
at least not the love which one like myself bears to his works: to be
brief, I discovered a thousand faults in my work, which neither public
nor critics discovered. However, I was beginning to get over this
misery, and to forgive my work all its imperfections, when--and I shake
when I mention it--the same kind of idea which perplexed me with regard
to the hawks and the gypsy pony rushed into my mind, and I forthwith
commenced touching the objects around me, in order to baffle the evil
chance, as you call it; it was neither more nor less than a doubt of the
legality of my claim to the thoughts, expressions, and situations
contained in the book; that is, to all that constituted the book. How
did I get them? How did they come into my mind? Did I invent them? Did
they originate with myself? Are they my own, or are they some other
body's? You see into what difficulty I had got; I won't trouble you by
relating all that I endured at that time, but will merely say that after
eating my own heart, as the Italians say, and touching every object that
came in my way for six months, I at length flung my book, I mean the copy
of it which I possessed, into the fire, and began another.

'But it was all in vain; I laboured at this other, finished it, and gave
it to the world; and no sooner had I done so, than the same thought was
busy in my brain, poisoning all the pleasure which I should otherwise
have derived from my work. How did I get all the matter which composed
it? Out of my own mind, unquestionably; but how did it come there--was
it the indigenous growth of the mind? And then I