Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto
you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp. I
have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others envying
the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather
have been tailors, weavers,--what not,--rather than the things they
were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend
literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest
set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost)
has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you
know not--may you never know!--the miseries of subsisting by authorship.
'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a
slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's dependant, to
drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your
free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious task-work. Those
fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to be that, contrary to other
trades, in which the master gets all the credit (a Jeweller or
silversmith for instance), and the journeyman, who really does the fine
work, is in the background, in _our_ work the world gives all the credit
to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_ journeymen, and therefore do they
hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of as
out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches! I contend that a
bookseller has a _relative honesty_ towards authors, not like his
honesty to the rest of the world. Baldwin, who first engaged me as Elia,
has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying
appeals). Yet how the knave fawned when I was of service to him! Yet I
daresay the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, etc.

Keep to your bank, and the bank 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. Oh, the corroding, torturing,
tormenting thoughts that disturb the