ained to be settled was, the more or less of the degree; and
also one other question, even more interesting still, viz.--whether
personal abuse were intermingled with literary. Happiness, as I have
experienced in other periods of my life, deep domestic happiness, makes
a man comparatively careless of ridicule, of sarcasm, or of abuse. But
calamity--the degradation, in the world's eye, of every man who is
fighting with pecuniary difficulties--exasperates beyond all that can be
imagined, a man's sensibility to insult. He is even apprehensive of
insult--tremulously fantastically apprehensive, where none is intended;
and like Wordsworth's shepherd, with his very understanding consciously
abused and depraved by his misfortunes is ready to say, at all hours--

And every man I met or faced,
Methought he knew some ill of me.

Some notice, perhaps, the newspaper had taken of this new satirical
journal, or some extracts might have been made from it; at all events, I
had ascertained its character so well that, in this respect, I had
nothing to learn. It now remained to get the number which professed to
be seasoned with my particular case; and it may be supposed that I did
not loiter over my breakfast after this discovery. Something which I saw
or suspected amongst the significant hints of a paragraph or
advertisement, made me fear that there might possibly be insinuations or
downright assertion in the libel requiring instant public notice; and,
therefore, on a motive of prudence, had I even otherwise felt that
indifference for slander which now I _do_ feel, but which, in those
years, morbid irritability of temperament forbade me to affect, I should
still have thought it right to look after the work; which now I did:
and, by nine o'clock in the morning--an hour at which few people had
seen me for years--I was on my road to Smithfield. Smithfield? Yes; even
so. All known and respectable publishers having declined any connexion
with the work, the writers had facetiously resorted to this _aceldama_,
or slaughtering quarter of London--to these vast shambles, as typical, I
suppose, of their own slaughtering spirit. On my road to Smithfield, I
could not but pause for one moment to reflect on the pure defecated
malice which must have prompted an attack upon myself. Retaliation or
retort it could not pretend to be. To most literary men, scattering
their written reviews, or their opinions, by word of mouth, to the right
and the lef