applicant was no other than
that arch-gatherer, Horace Walpole, who gave such an impulse to the
collecting mania; he declined selling the work, however, for he had
thoughts of printing it himself. The application was mentioned by him,
and, of course, the manuscript gained notoriety, while the original
letter became a greater desideratum than ever. The library at G---- was
searched most carefully by a couple of brother book-worms, who crept
over it from cornice to carpeting; but to no purpose.

{Horace Walpole = Horace Walpole (1717-1797), a prolific writer,
connoisseur, and collector, best known for his extensive
correspondence; he established a taste for literary collecting by
would-be cultured gentlemen in England}

Some ten years later still--about the time, by the bye, when
Chatterton's career came to such a miserable close in London, and when
Gilbert was dying in a hospital at Paris--it happened that a worthy
physician, well known in the town of Southampton for his benevolence
and eccentricity, was on a professional visit to the child of a poor
journeyman trunk-maker, in the same place. A supply of old paper had
just been brought in for the purpose of lining trunks, according to the
practice of the day. A workman was busy sorting these, rejecting some
as refuse, and preserving others, when the doctor stopped to answer an
inquiry about the sick child.

{Chatterton = Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), British poet, who created
an imaginary Thomas Rowley, a supposed medieval monk, to whom he
ascribed some of his poems. Chatterton committed suicide at the age of
18 when a poem of his, allegedly by Rowley, was rejected; he was buried
in a pauper's grave. Susan Fenimore Cooper no doubt has this in mind in
naming a character in this story Theodosia Rowley.

{Gilbert = Nicolas Gilbert (1751-1780), French poet, who died in Paris
at the age of 29. The French writer Count Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863),
in his book of essays "Stello" (1832), popularized a legend that
Gilbert had died insane and in abject poverty at the charity hospital
of the Hotel Dieu in Paris, and compared his miserable end with that of
Chatteron; it seems likely that Vigny, whose book appeared while Susan
Fenimore Cooper was studying in Paris, was her source for this
reference to Gilbert. In fact, Gilbert was not impoverished, and died
of injuries after falling from his horse}

"Better, Hopkins--doing well. But what have you here? I never see old
papers b