In compliance with my usual practice, I send you this letter, containing a trifling biographical sketch, and an offer of my literary services. I don’t suppose you will accept them, treating me as for forty-three years past all the journals of this empire have done; for I have offered my contributions to them all—all. It was in the year 1798, that escaping from a French prison (that of Toulon, where I had been condemned to the hulks for forgery)—I say, from a French prison, but to find myself incarcerated in an English dungeon (fraudulent bankruptcy, implicated in swindling transactions, falsification of accounts, and contempt of court), I began to amuse my hours of imprisonment by literary composition.
I sent in that year my “Apology for the Corsican,” relative to die murder of Captain Wright, to the late Mr. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, preparing an answer to the same in the Times journal; but as the apology was not accepted (though the argument of it was quite clear, and much to my credit), so neither was the answer received—a sublime piece, Mr. PUNCH, an unanswerable answer.
In the year 1799, I made an attempt on the journal of the late Reverend Mr. Thomas Hill, then fast sinking in years; but he had ill-treated my father, pursuing him before Mr. Justice Fielding for robbing him of a snuff-box, in the year 1740; and he continued his resentment towards my father’s unoffending son. I was cruelly rebuffed by Mr. Hill, as indeed I have been by every other newspaper proprietor.
No; there is not a single periodical print which has appeared for forty-three years since, to which I did not make some application. I have by me essays and fugitive pieces in fourteen trunks, seven carpet bags of trifles in verse, and a portmanteau with best part of an epic poem, which it does not become me to praise. I have no less than four hundred and ninety-five acts of dramatic composition, which have been rejected even by the Syncretic Association.
Such is the set that for forty-three years has been made against a man of genius by an envious literary world! Are you going to follow in its wake? Ha, ha, ha! no less than seven thousand three hundred times (the exact number of my applications) have I asked that question. Think well before you reject me, Mr. PUNCH—think well, and at least listen to what I have to say.
It is this: I am not wishing any longer to come forward with tragedies, epics, essays, or original compositions. I am old now—morose in temper, troubled with poverty, jaundice, imprisonment, and habitual indigestion. I hate everybody, and, with the exception of gin-and-water, everything. I know every language, both in the known and unknown worlds; I am profoundly ignorant of history, or indeed of any other useful science, but have a smattering of all. I am excellently qualified to judge and lash the vices of the age, having experienced, I may almost say, every one of them in my own person. The immortal and immoral Goethe, that celebrated sage of Germany, has made exactly the same confession.
I have a few and curious collection of Latin and Greek quotations.
And what is the result I draw from this? This simple one—that, of all men living, I am the most qualified to be a CRITIC, and hereby offer myself to your notice in that capacity.
Recollect, I am always at Home—Fleet Prison, Letter L, fourth staircase, paupers’-ward—for a guinea, and a bottle of Hodges’ Cordial, I will do anything. I will, for that sum, cheerfully abuse my own father or mother. I can smash Shakspeare; I can prove Milton to be a driveller, or the contrary: but, for preference, take, as I have said, the abusive line.
Send me over then, Mr. P., any person’s works whose sacrifice you may require. I will cut him up, sir; I will flay him—flagellate him—finish him! You had better not send me (unless you have a private grudge against the authors, when I am of course at your service)—you had better not send me any works of real merit; for I am infallibly prepared to show that there is not any merit in them. I have not been one of the great unread for forty-three years, without turning my misfortunes to some account. Sir, I know how to make use of my adversity. I have been accused, and rightfully too, of swindling, forgery, and slander. I have been many times kicked down stairs. I am totally deficient in personal courage; but, though I can’t fight, I can rail, ay, and well. Send me somebody’s works, and you’ll see how I will treat them.