As soon as I became possessed of my first volume, neatly stitched up and
boarded, my sense of the necessity of communicating with some one became
ungovernable. Janet was inexorable, and seemed already to have tired of
my literary confidence; for whenever I drew near the subject, after
evading it as long as she could, she made, under some pretext or other,
a bodily retreat to the kitchen or the cockloft, her own peculiar and
inviolate domains. My publisher would have been a natural resource; but
he understands his business too well, and follows it too closely, to
desire to enter into literary discussions, wisely considering, that he
who has to sell books has seldom leisure to read them. Then my
acquaintance, now that I have lost Mrs. Bethune Baliol, are of that
distant and accidental kind, to whom I had not face enough to communicate
the nature of my uneasiness, and who probably would only have laughed
at me had I made any attempt to interest them in my labours.

Reduced thus to a sort of despair, I thought of my friend and man of
business, Mr. Fairscribe. His habits, it was true, were not likely to
render him indulgent to light literature, and, indeed, I had more than
once noticed his daughters, and especially my little songstress, whip
into her reticule what looked very like a circulating library volume, as
soon as her father entered the room. Still he was not only my assured,
but almost my only friend, and I had little doubt that he would take an
interest in the volume for the sake of the author, which the work itself
might fail to inspire. I sent him, therefore, the book, carefully sealed
up, with an intimation that I requested the favour of his opinion upon
the contents, of which I affected to talk in the depreciatory style,
which calls for point-blank contradiction, if your correspondent possess
a grain of civility.