Somehow or other an author always falls upon his feet. If you, dear reader, without any other recommendation than the figure and countenance which nature has bestowed upon you--even though you have never been solicited to join a gipsy encampment, or to participate in the mysteries of thimble-rig--should start upon a pedestrian expedition through these islands, rather shabbily attired, and carrying your bundle on the end of your stick, the odds are that you do not meet at every turn with a beneficent squire of considerable fortune, but eccentric literary habits, to invite you to make his house your home so long as you may please to honour it. This may be a reflection on modern hospitality; however, try the experiment for yourself, and you will find that we are right in our assumption. But, if you are an author, the case is very different--at least it will be different when you print. The _mens divinior_ will have come out in some way which passes human understanding. You may have been standing flattening your nose against an alehouse window, thinking perhaps intently on the means of liquidating your reckoning, when a chariot shall arrest itself at the door; a metaphysical gentleman steps out, for the apparent purpose of regaling himself with a glass of bitters; and in the course of five minutes' conversation, you so gain his heart, that you are whirled off to the mansion-house or the lodge, and forced to submit, for the next fortnight, to a regimen of turtle, venison, and claret. Such are the horrid but unavoidable nuisances of superior mental cultivation. It is no use struggling against the stream--you must perforce submit to it. And accordingly, when you publish, you enter a proper protest against the violence which has been done to your feelings, by removing you from a damp truckle-bed to a couch of eider down; and by forcing down your throat abhorred foreign luxuries, in place of that bread-and-cheese which you patriotically preferred as your nutriment.