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.