oral and social character,
so far from offending, their libels rather fell in with his own shadowy
style of self-portraiture, and gratified the strange inverted ambition
that possessed him. But the slighting opinion which they ventured to
express of his genius,--seconded as it was by that inward
dissatisfaction with his own powers, which they whose standard of
excellence is highest are always the surest to feel,--mortified and
disturbed him; and, being the first sounds of ill augury that had come
across his triumphal career, startled him, as we have seen, into serious
doubts of its continuance.

Had he been occupying himself, at the time, with any new task, that
confidence in his own energies, which he never truly felt but while in
the actual exercise of them, would have enabled him to forget these
humiliations of the moment in the glow and excitement of anticipated
success. But he had just pledged himself to the world to take a long
farewell of poesy,--had sealed up that only fountain from which his
heart ever drew refreshment or strength,--and thus was left, idly and
helplessly, to brood over the daily taunts of his enemies, without the
power of avenging himself when they insulted his person, and but too
much disposed to agree with them when they made light of his genius. "I
am afraid, (he says, in noticing these attacks in one of his letters,)
what you call _trash_ is plaguily to the purpose, and very good sense
into the bargain; and, to tell the truth, for some little time past, I
have been myself much of the same opinion."

In this sensitive state of mind,--which he but ill disguised or relieved
by an exterior of gay defiance or philosophic contempt,--we can hardly
feel surprised that he should have, all at once, come to the resolution,
not only of persevering in his determination to write no more in future,
but of purchasing back the whole of his past copyrights, and suppressing
every page and line he had ever written. On his first mention of this
design, Mr. Murray naturally doubted as to its seriousness; but the
arrival of the following letter, enclosing a draft for the amount of the
copyrights, put his intentions beyond question.

[Footnote 28: It was the fear of this sort of back-water current to
which so rapid a flow of fame seemed liable, that led some even of his
warmest admirers, ignorant as they were yet of the boundlessness of his
resources, to tremble a little at the frequency of his appearances
befo