st enviable, his way of life is perhaps, among
the many modes by which an ardent mind endeavours to express its
activity, the most thickly beset with suffering and degradation. Look
at the biography of authors! Except the Newgate Calendar, it is the
most sickening chapter in the history of man. The calamities of these
people are a fertile topic; and too often their faults and vices have
kept pace with their calamities. Nor is it difficult to see how this
has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accompanied with a
peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential
constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so
formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency;
the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid
soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life;
its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that
perennial flow of satisfaction, coarse but plenteous and substantial,
of which happiness in this world of ours is made. The most finished
efforts of the mind give it little pleasure, frequently they give it
pain; for men's aims are ever far beyond their strength. And the
outward recompense of these undertakings, the distinction they confer,
is of still smaller value: the desire for it is insatiable even when
successful; and when baffled, it issues in jealousy and envy, and
every pitiful and painful feeling. So keen a temperament with so
little to restrain or satisfy, so much to distress or tempt it,
produces contradictions which few are adequate to reconcile. Hence the
unhappiness of literary men, hence their faults and follies.

Thus literature is apt to form a dangerous and discontenting
occupation even for the amateur. But for him whose rank and worldly
comforts depend on it, who does not live to write, but writes to live,
its difficulties and perils are fearfully increased. Few spectacles
are more afflicting than that of such a man, so gifted and so fated,
so jostled and tossed to and fro in the rude bustle of life, the
buffetings of which he is so little fitted to endure. Cherishing, it
may be, the loftiest thoughts, and clogged with the meanest wants; of
pure and holy purposes, yet ever driven from the straight path by the
pressure of necessity, or the impulse of passion; thirsting for glory,
and frequently in want of daily bread; hovering between the empyrean
of his fancy and the squalid desert