REALIZATION. TERMINATION.]

* * * * *


A FAIR OFFER

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