r, after producing
something which gives me perfect satisfaction, and which has cost me
perhaps days and nights of brooding, I chance to take up a book for the
sake of a little relaxation, a book which I never saw before, I am sure
to find in it something more or less resembling some part of what I have
been just composing. You will easily conceive the distress which then
comes over me; 'tis then that I am almost tempted to execrate the chance
which, by discovering my latent powers, induced me to adopt a profession
of such anxiety and misery.

"For some time past I have given up reading almost entirely, owing to the
dread which I entertain of lighting upon something similar to what I
myself have written. I scarcely ever transgress without having almost
instant reason to repent. To-day, when I took up the newspaper, I saw in
a speech of the Duke of Rhododendron, at an agricultural dinner, the very
same ideas, and almost the same expressions which I had put into the
mouth of an imaginary personage of mine, on a widely different occasion;
you saw how I dashed the newspaper down--you saw how I touched the floor;
the touch was to baffle the evil chance, to prevent the critics detecting
any similarity between the speech of the Duke of Rhododendron at the
agricultural dinner, and the speech of my personage. My sensibility on
the subject of my writings is so great, that sometimes a chance word is
sufficient to unman me, I apply it to them in a superstitious sense; for
example, when you said some time ago that the dark hour was coming on, I
applied it to my works--it appeared to bode them evil fortune; you saw
how I touched, it was to baffle the evil chance; but I do not confine
myself to touching when the fear of the evil chance is upon me. To
baffle it I occasionally perform actions which must appear highly
incomprehensible; I have been known, when riding in company with other
people, to leave the direct road, and make a long circuit by a miry lane
to the place to which we were going. I have also been seen attempting to
ride across a morass, where I had no business whatever, and in which my
horse finally sank up to its saddle-girths, and was only extricated by
the help of a multitude of hands. I have, of course, frequently been
asked the reason for such conduct, to which I have invariably returned no
answer, for I scorn duplicity; whereupon people have looked mysteriously,
and sometimes put their fingers to their forehea