Truly given, with its egotism and its barrenness, it would look too like the chalked advertisements on a dead wall. Moreover, Pope has read a lesson to self-importance in the Memoirs of P.P., the Parish Clerk, who was only notable after all amongst his neighbours as a swallower of loaches. Even in such practical whims and oddities I am deficient,—for instance, eschewing razors, or bolting clasp-knives, riding on painted ponies, sleeping for weeks, fasting for months, devouring raw tripe, and similar eccentricities, which have entitled sundry knaves, quacks, boobies, and brutes, to a brief biography in the Wonderful Magazine. And, in the absence of these distinctions, I am equally deficient in any spiritual pretensions. I have had none of those experiences which render the lives of saintlings, not yet in their teens, worth their own weight in paper and print, and consequently my personal history, as a Tract, would read as flat as the Pilgrim’s Progress without the Giants, the Lions, and the grand single combat with the Devil.
To conclude my life,—“upon my life,”—is not worth giving or taking. The principal just suffices for me to live upon; and of course, would afford little interest to anyone else. Besides, I have a bad memory; and a personal history would assuredly be but a middling one, of which I have forgotten the beginning and cannot foresee the end. I must, therefore, respectfully decline giving my life to the world—at least till I have done with it—but to soften the refusal, I am willing, instead of a written character of myself, to set down all that I can recall of other authors, and, accordingly, the next number will contain the first instalment of
[2] He perhaps took the hint from Dibdin, who lays down the rule in his Sea Songs, that a Naval Hero ought to be a Lion in battle, but afterwards a Lamb.
[3] On a march to Berlin, with the 19th Prussian Infantry, I could never succeed in passing myself off as anything but the Regimental Chaplain.
THE COMPASS, WITH VARIATIONS.
“The Needles have sometimes been fatal to Mariners.”
PICTURE OF ISLE OF WIGHT.