398 The Perplexities of a Book- Worm. [ APRIL, 



outstripped me in information, without paying the dear penalties of 

 wretchedness and destitution. I had dedicated myself to books from 

 my childhood I had early parted from society, and all that others called 

 its pleasures for objects, perhaps undefined, but certainly connected 

 with knowledge yet I found in the end that my toils were only a waste 

 of my powers, that they left me embittered by a broken and imperfect, 

 yet disastrous, weight of acquirement while others, the gay, the volup- 

 tuous, the thoughtless, who seemed never to have tasted the sickly fruits 

 of solitude, were winning the world's smile for the flippancy with which 

 they treated every topic, that had cost me incalculable labour and depri- 

 vation. The blandishments of society, then, I exclaimed, are not in 

 vain : they sharpen the sensibilities, and render more acute the organs 

 of our perception. Communication between mind and mind, and the 

 constant turmoil of discussion, and the collision of opinion, are calcu- 

 lated to preserve the understanding from rust. But the rust was cor- 

 roding upon mine the canker was slowly seizing upon every fibre of 

 my reason. Yet it was not too late to seek health amongst men to 

 abandon, for a while, the fetid air of my dungeon, and go abroad into 

 the universe. My determination was formed not rashly, but with a 

 melancholy conviction of its necessity ; and I adopted it in that despe- 

 rate obedience with which a wretched mourner consents to leave the 

 grave when its last human obsequies are performed. 



Books, unlike women, are the better for being old this was my 

 maxim they are the better for being new, said my amended creed. 

 The new books linked, as it were, the antiquarian and the novelist ; 

 they united the lore of the ancients, and the vivacity of the moderns ; 

 they were written with knowledge and spirit ; and their wisdom was 

 put out in the language of all ages, and not melted down in the crucible 

 of an epoch, or a sect. The revolution they effected in my mind was 

 accompanied by minor observations interwoven with passing literature, 

 which helped to impress still more vividly upon my imagination the 

 picture of my change. I remarked the extraordinary fecundity of the 

 press in connection with the names of the eminent publishers and the 

 successful writers j and the whole drama of publication floated before 

 me in a pleasing chaos of wonder and illusion. I forged a thousand 

 deceptious notions of men whose names were constantly before me. 

 Murray and Colburn were my domestic physicians, and Longman and 

 his partners my medical advisers extraordinary. Southey, and Byron, 

 and Wordsworth, and Campbell, and Moore, wrought my curiosity and 

 my invention almost to frenzy : I sat hours etching their characters and 

 their books, and deceiving myself into fixed notions of their habits and 

 lineaments ; until at last I familiarized myself to the identity I fondly 

 traced for each. There was not in the whole of this shadowy gallery of 

 portraits a single shade or tint of unpleasantness or hardness all was 

 aerial, tender, spiritual. I moulded the author into a semblance cor- 

 responding with the tone and nature of his works : the beautiful were 

 beautiful the impassioned, impassioned the lofty, lofty. What child 

 hath not dreamt of Mr. Newberry, the good Mr. Newberry of St. Paul's 

 Church-yard, arid loved him almost as a playmate ? And I was but a 

 child of a higher temperament, and a more aged enthusiasm. 



These ruminations led to extensive consequences. I determined, as 

 I said before, to abandon my imprisonment ; and I thought nothing 

 could be easier than to meet and mingle with the living originals of 

 my pictures. To moot Southey on an old doctrine of the church to 



