I had never realised before the tremendous hardship of periodicity. Every week or every day the writer must chew the cud of events and deliver his punctual copy. Every day, wet or fine, the newspaper sheet must be filled: filled, but not congested. But it is only now and then that the phase is good for really happy writing. Sometimes everything is germinating, but nothing seems to happen; at others a dozen issues compete for attention. Now one does not want to write because there is nothing to stimulate one to utterance; now because one wants time to consider some dominating event. But the columns stand waiting. Henceforth for my poor irregular brain there shall be no more periodicity. I look over these articles and suddenly there joins on to my sense of them the fact that on my table are lying the proofs of a collected edition of my writings; eight and twenty fat volumes they will make. I perceive I have already lived a long, industrious life. I celebrate my death as a periodic journalist--and these proofs extend the obituary sense beyond the scope of that event. If I am not actually tucked up in my literary death-bed I am at least sitting on it. Possibly I may yet take a few more airings before I send for the clergyman and the heirs and turn in for good and start blessing and forgiving people from my pillow, but the longer part is finished. What does it all amount to, that mass of written matter? The gist of it is an extraordinarily sustained and elaborated adverse criticism of the world as it is, a persistent refusal to believe that this is the best or even the most interesting of all possible worlds. There is a developing attempt culminating in the _Outline of History_ to show that the world of men is only temporarily what it is, and might be altered to an enormous extent. There is a search through every sort of revolutionary project and effort for the material for conclusive alteration. The total effect of these articles and these books of mine on my mind, is of a creature trying to find its way out of a prison into which it has fallen. I recall how that in my boyhood I made a little prison of paper and cardboard for a beetle, and how I heard the poor perplexed beast incessantly crawling and scratching and fluttering inside. I forget what became of it. Perhaps I gave it its freedom; perhaps it pressed and worried at the corners where the light came through, and made an enlarged hole and worried its own way out. But I remember the dirty scratches and traces of its explorations on the unfolded paper cage. To a larger mind these books and articles of mine will seem very like those markings.