129 

 THE MAIDEN EFFORT. 



THE first time I experienced the pleasantness of 

 seeing one's self in print was shortly after the death of 

 - when I ventured to write a sort of elegy, of 

 five or six verses, on the event, miserable stuff enough, 

 God knows ; even I myself in the sanguine feeling of 

 youth was not vain enough, when it was finished, 

 to set much value on it : however I was hazardous 

 enough to slip it into the letter-box of a newspaper 

 office as a candidate for the honor of typography, I an- 

 nexed a note to the editor, requesting him to throw r 

 the M S. into the fire if not admissable into his 

 columns. 



Anterior to that time, I had not been much in the 

 habit of looking at newspapers ; when I did it was only 

 to pick out the contents of the " Poet's corner, " or to 

 see what novelties presented themselves under the heads 

 accidents, offences, fyc. so that the first intimation I re- 

 ceived of the death of was by hearing the in- 

 telligence poured forth, in a doleful twang, by one of the 

 itinerant ballad merchants, who furnish the " profane 

 vulgar " with full, true and particular accounts of all 

 bloody murders, dying speeches, executions, &c. in all 

 their genera and species. She offered for sale an 

 account of the last hours of the deceased " for the low 

 charge of one half-penny /'her announcement electrified 

 me with sorrow, (it was impossible not to have pro- 

 duced such an effect,) for I had spent some of my most 

 delightful hours in lingering over the creations of his 

 genius : I purchased a paper, containing the melan- 

 choly tidings, and read it through, more than once, 

 standing in the crowded market-place of the " Northern 

 Athens, " jostled about by burly-headed farmers, who 

 prized a sack of potatoes or a sucking pig more than all 

 the poets under the sun, and running the risk of having 

 the extremities of my nether limbs comminuted beneath 

 remorseless cart-wheels ; after I had read this document, 

 which was duly ornamented by a wood-cut of a coffin 

 powdered with silver nails, as a head-piece, I began to 



VOL. i. 1833. R 



