made to Bernard Barton, who thought of abandoning his place in a bank
and of relying upon literary labor for support:--"Throw yourself on the
world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ
of booksellers would afford you! Throw yourself, rather, my dear Sir,
from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash, headlong, upon iron spikes. If
you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make
much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the
booksellers. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them,--come
not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread,--some
repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a counting-house,
all agreeing that they would rather have been tailors, weavers,--what
not?--rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some
go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a madhouse. Oh! you know
not--may you never know!--the miseries of subsisting by authorship."
Thus he esteemed of priceless worth honestly-earned independent time for
the pursuits that were dearest to him.

His literary and social avocations were so intimately blended that they
seem to have been almost the same. He was as thoughtful in his evening
parties as he was in the act of composition, and as gentle and kindly in
writing as he was to his friends. He gathered about him not many of the
most famous, but many of the most original and peculiar men of his time.
His Wednesday-evening parties were assemblies of thinkers. They were
composed in large part of men who were not balanced by a profession, who
were devoted only to wit, fancy, or speculation, who cultivated each a
peculiar field and cherished each peculiar tastes and opinions, who
were interested in different quarters of the heavens, and yet who came
together, prompted by the spirit of sociality and kindliness, to lay
perhaps the backs of their heads together, and to talk always sincerely
and wisely, but in the form of sense or nonsense, as the case might be.