a shilling a week: meat he seldom tasted, and his food
consisted chiefly of oatmeal and potatoes sent from his father's
house. In a letter to his father, written with great purity and
simplicity of style, he thus gives a picture of himself, mental and
bodily: "Honoured Sir, I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope
that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new years' day, but
work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that
account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my
sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole, I am rather better than
otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees: the weakness of my
nerves had so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past
wants nor look forward into futurity, for the least anxiety or
perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole
frame. Sometimes indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a
little lightened, I _glimmer_ a little into futurity; but my principal
and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and
forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the
thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu
to all the pains and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary
life. As for the world, I despair of ever making a figure in it: I am
not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I
foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some
measure prepared and daily preparing to meet them. I have but just
time and paper to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of
virtue and piety you have given me, which were but too much neglected
at the time of giving them, but which, I hope, have been remembered
ere it is yet too late." This remarkable letter was written in the
twenty-second year of his age; it alludes to the illness which seems
to have been the companion of his youth, a nervous headache, brought
on by constant toil and anxiety; and it speaks of the melancholy which
is the common attendant of genius, and its sensibilities, aggravated
by despair of distinction. The catastrophe which happened ere this
letter was well in his father's hand, accords ill with quotations from
the Bible, and hopes fixed in heaven:--"As we gave," he says, "a
welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire, and burnt to
ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence."

This disaster was followed by