No! as I said at the end of the last chapter but one, before I was led
away by the circumstances of that time to give the world the benefit
of my magnetic reminiscences--_valeat quantum!_--I was not yet bitten,
despite Colley Grattan's urgings, with any temptation to attempt
fiction, and "passion, me boy!" But I am surprised on turning over my
old diaries to find how much I was writing, and planning to write,
in those days, and not less surprised at the amount of running about
which I accomplished.

My life in those years of the thirties must have been a very busy
one. 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 the
like, to all kinds of periodical publications, many of them long since
dead and forgotten. That the world should have forgotten all these
articles "goes without saying." But what is not perhaps so common an
incident in the career of a penman is, that _I_ had in the majority
of cases utterly forgotten them, and all about them, until they were
recalled to mind by turning the yellow pages of my treasured but
almost equally forgotten journals! I beg to observe, also, that all
this pen-work was not only printed, but _paid for_. My motives were of
a decidedly mercenary description. "_Hic scribit famâ ductus, at ille
fame._" I belonged emphatically to the latter category, and little
indeed of my multifarious productions ever found its final resting
place in the waste-paper basket. They were rejected often, but
re-despatched a second and a third time, if necessary, to some other
"organ," and eventually swallowed by some editor or other.