when one
is fond of cheese, as I am. My last bread and cheese dinner cost me
fourteen pence. There is drink, sir; with bread and cheese one must
drink porter, sir."

"Then, sir, eat bread--bread alone. As good men as yourself have eaten
bread alone; they have been glad to get it, sir. If with bread and
cheese you must drink porter, sir, with bread alone you can, perhaps,
drink water, sir."

However, I got paid at last for my writings in the review, not, it is
true, in the current coin of the realm, but in certain bills; there were
two of them, one payable at twelve, and the other at eighteen months
after date. It was a long time before I could turn these bills to any
account; at last I found a person who, at a discount of only thirty per
cent., consented to cash them; not, however, without sundry grimaces,
and, what was still more galling, holding, more than once, the
unfortunate papers high in air between his forefinger and thumb. So ill,
indeed, did I like this last action, that I felt much inclined to snatch
them away. I restrained myself, however, for I remembered that it was
very difficult to live without money, and that, if the present person did
not discount the bills, I should probably find no one else that would.

But if the treatment which I had experienced from the publisher, previous
to making this demand upon him, was difficult to bear, that which I
subsequently underwent was far more so; his great delight seemed to
consist in causing me misery and mortification; if, on former occasions,
he was continually sending me in quest of lives and trials difficult to
find, he now was continually demanding lives and trials which it was
impossible to find; the personages whom he mentioned never having lived,
nor consequently been tried. Moreover, some of my best lives and trials
which I had corrected and edited with particular care, and on which I
prided myself no little, he caused to be cancelled after they had passed
through the press. Amongst these was the life of "Gentleman Harry."
"They are drugs, sir," said the publisher, "drugs; that life of Harry
Simms has long been the greatest drug in the calendar--has it not,
Taggart?"

Taggart made no answer save by taking a pinch of snuff. The reader has,
I hope, not forgotten Taggart, whom I mentioned whilst giving an account
of my first morning's visit to the publisher. I beg Taggart's pardon for
having been so long silent about him; but he was a very sil