E-text prepared by the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading
Team from images provided by the Million Book Project.
1887
No! as I said at the end of the last chapter but one, before I was ledaway by the circumstances of that time to give the world the benefitof my magnetic reminiscences—valeat quantum!—I was not yet bitten,despite Colley Grattan's urgings, with any temptation to attemptfiction, and "passion, me boy!" But I am surprised on turning over myold diaries to find how much I was writing, and planning to write,in those days, and not less surprised at the amount of running aboutwhich I accomplished.
My life in those years of the thirties must have been a very busyone. I find myself writing and sending off a surprising number of"articles" on all sorts of subjects—reviews, sketches of travel,biographical notices, fragments from the byeways of history, and thelike, to all kinds of periodical publications, many of them long sincedead and forgotten. That the world should have forgotten all thesearticles "goes without saying." But what is not perhaps so common anincident in the career of a penman is, that I had in the majorityof cases utterly forgotten them, and all about them, until they wererecalled to mind by turning the yellow pages of my treasured butalmost equally forgotten journals! I beg to observe, also, that allthis pen-work was not only printed, but paid for. My motives were ofa decidedly mercenary description. "Hic scribit famâ ductus, at illefame." I belonged emphatically to the latter category, and littleindeed of my multifarious productions ever found its final restingplace in the waste-paper basket. They were rejected often, butre-despatched a second and a third time, if necessary, to some other"organ," and eventually swallowed by some editor or other.
I am surprised, too, at the amount of locomotion which I contrived tocombine with all this scribbling. I must have gone about, I think,like a tax-gatherer, with an inkstand slung to my button