ank will keep you. Trust not to the
public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy
_personage_ cares. I bless every star, that Providence, not seeing
good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon
the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B.B., in the
banking-office: what! is there not from six to eleven p.m. six days
in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity
of man's time, if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth,
converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding,
torturing, tormenting thoughts, that disturb the brain of the unlucky
wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract
all my fond complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as
lover's quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber
of the desk, that makes me live. A little grumbling is a wholesome
medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and
embrace this our close, but unharassing way of life. I am quite
serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and
will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot
or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.

TO THE SAME

_A cold_

9 _Jan_. 1824.

DEAR B.B.,

Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable
day-mare,--'a whoreson lethargy', Falstaff calls it,--an indisposition
to do anything, or to be anything,--a total deadness and distaste,--a
suspension of vitality,--an indifference to locality,--a numb,
soporifical, good-for-nothingness,--an ossification all over,--an
oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,--a mind-stupor,--a
brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you
ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to
water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my
excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it
is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet.
I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than
another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge
----'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when
the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only
by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain
in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is
gone into