Then, Lord be thankit! I can beg.

You will then, I hope, Sir, forgive my troubling you with the
enclosed,[14] and spare a poor heart-crushed devil a world of
apologies--a business he is very unfit for at any time, but at present,
widowed as he is of every woman-giving comfort, he is utterly incapable
of. Sad and grievous of late, Sir, has been my tribulation, and many and
piercing my sorrows; and, had it not been for the loss the world would
have sustained in losing so great a poet, I had ere now done as a much
wiser man, the famous Achitophel of long-headed memory, did before me,
when he "went home and set his house in order." I have lost, Sir, that
dearest earthly treasure, that greatest blessing here below, that last,
best gift which completed Adam's happiness in the garden of bliss; I
have lost, I have lost--my trembling hand refuses its office, the
frighted ink recoils up the quill,--I have lost a, a, a wife.

Fairest of God's creation, last and best,
Now art thou lost!

You have doubtless, Sir, heard my story, heard it with all its
exaggerations; but as my actions, and my motives for action, are
peculiarly like myself and that is peculiarly like nobody else, I shall
just beg a leisure moment and a spare tear of you until I tell my own
story my own way.

I have been all my life, Sir, one of the rueful-looking, long-visaged
sons of disappointment. A damned star has always kept my zenith, and
shed its hateful influence in the emphatic curse of the prophet--"And
behold whatsoever he doth, it shall not prosper!" I rarely hit where I
aim, and if I want anything, I am almost sure never to find it where I