In 1838, at the urgent request of Mr. Newcomb, he removed to Stamford, under a verbal promise that when the editor retired, which he intimated would be very soon, Cooper should have the sole management. After remaining for a few months in the position of clerk to Mr. Newcomb, and finding to his chagrin that the old editor gave no sign of keeping to his agreement, he very rashly threw down his pen and gave notice to leave. A little patience might have sufficed to gain his end, but his mortification was extreme, and so a good situation, worth, in all, £300 a year, was sacrificed. "On the 1st of June, 1839," he writes, "we got on the stage-coach, with our boxes of books, at Stamford, and away I went to make my first venture in London." The six years spent at Lincoln had been a time of literary activity in more ways than that of newspaper correspondence. Many minor pieces, such as are found at the end of the collected poems, were written, and the title and plan of his best poetical work, "The Purgatory of Suicides," was decided upon. But he had done more in the way of prose. The first volume of a historical romance was finished ere he left Lincoln, and now that he had come to London, he hoped to make his way with this as an introduction to the publishers and the reading world. But he very soon discovered, as thousands besides have done, that he had little to hope from patrons, even though, like Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, they might be men to whom he had rendered some political service in days gone by, and that his unlucky manuscript was a poor broken reed to lean upon. After nine months' bitter experience of fruitless attempts to find employment, and when all his stock of five hundred books, the dear companions of the last ten years of earnest study, had been sold, and even his father's old silver watch and articles of clothing had been carried to the pawnshop, he was fortunate enough to make an engagement, at £3 per week, as editor of the _Kentish Mercury_, _Gravesend Journal_, and _Greenwich Gazette_, of which Mr. William Dougal Christie was the proprietor. He had held this office but a short time when disagreement as to the management of the paper led him to give notice of retirement from his awkward position. Strangely enough, at this very juncture a letter reached him from a friend in Lincoln enclosing another from the manager of a paper in Leicester, asking to be informed of "the whereabouts of Thomas Cooper, who wrote the articles entitled 'Lincoln Preachers' in the _Stamford Mercury_." Dropping the letter, he exclaimed to his wife, "The message has come at last--the message of Destiny! We are going to live at Leicester," thus expressing a thought he had secretly cherished for years, "that he had something to do of a stirring and important nature at Leicester." And so it proved, but that "something" was very different from what he had ever anticipated. Answering the inquiry in