CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS.
The miseries and disappointments of the literary life are proverbial:
"Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol."
To these "calamities of authors," I wish to add a new, and as yet unrecorded trial, incidental to this age of cheap postage and extravagant puffs. I am myself a small author, and have written on theology and antiquarianism; and my publisher's shelves know the weight of my labours. Conceive then my delight, a few weeks ago, at receiving a "confidential" letter from B. D., requesting the immediate transmission of my theological tomes to a country address; on the representation that, although B. D. well knew that my writings had been favourably received, he judged that "striking recommendations at this moment in influential journals to which he had reviewing access during the parliamentary recess, would prove of essential service." I wrote to my publisher, who coolly answered that it was "no go;" and I even stood the tempting shock of a second application from B. D., remonstratively hinting that, but for the non-arrival of the volumes, a notice would have appeared that very week in an "important quarter." The hopeful mind has difficulty in settling down into a belief that men deceive.
Not a month had elapsed before I received another letter, sealed with such a signet as in size would rival the jewel sometimes seen pendent from the waistcoat pocket of a Jew broker on Saturday, and engraven with evidence of illustrious lineage, if quarterings be only half true. I did not break this magnificent seal, but I tore open the envelope, and I found that my antiquarian researches had been most flatteringly estimated by a gentleman with a double surname, which happened to be familiar to me. The communication was, of course, "private;" and it expressed the writer's knowledge, from hearsay, of the "value, merit, and ability" of my book, and the satisfaction it would afford my correspondent, to give it a "handsome an elaborate review in both the widely circulating and reviewing publications with which he had the honour of being connected." A copy of my work was to be sent to his own address, or to that of his bookseller: or, even a third course was obligingly opened to me—"he would send his man-servant to my publisher for the volume!" I sent the book, and the same day communicated with the head of the family who legally bore this very handsome name used by my correspondent, and he told me that he had just received 5l. worth of books from a great house in "the Row," which were obviously designed to be the response to an application from the gentleman with a large seal, who was "an impostor." This may be so; but I have received an acknowledgement for the receipt of my little work, so kind and courtly in its tone, that I do not even yet quite despair of one day reading the promised "handsome and elaborate review."
A SMALL AUTHOR.