(21.) I do not wish to hear anything more about pen, ink, or paper, style, printer, or press! Venture no more to tell me: “Antisthenes, you are a first-rate author; continue to write. Shall we never see a folio volume of yours? Speak of all the virtues and vices in one connected and methodical treatise, without end,” and they should also add, “without any sale.” I renounce everything that either was, is, or will be a book! Beryllus swoons when he sees a cat,[614] and I on beholding a book. Am I better fed or warmer clothed; is my room sheltered against northern blasts; have I so much as a feather-bed,[615] after having had my works for sale for more than twenty years? You say I have a great name and a first-rate reputation: you may just as well tell me that I have a stock of air I cannot dispose of. Have I one grain of that metal which procures all things? The low pettifogger[616] swells his bill, get costs paid which never came out of his pocket, and a count or a magistrate becomes his son-in-law. A man in a red or filemot-coloured dress[617] is changed into a secretary, and in a little time is richer than his master, who remains a commoner whilst he buys a title for hard cash. B ...[618] enriches himself by some waxwork show; B ... by selling some bottled river-water.[619] Another quack[620] arrives with one trunk from the other side of the Pyrenees; it is scarcely unpacked when pensions rain on him, and he is ready to return whence he came with plenty of mules and cartloads full of property. Mercury is Mercury,[621] and nothing else; and as gold alone cannot pay his go-betweens and his intrigues, he obtains, moreover, favour and distinctions. To confine myself to lawful gain, you pay a tiler for his tiles and a workman for his time and labour; but do you pay an author for his thoughts and writings? and if his thoughts are excellent, do you pay him liberally? Does he furnish his house or become ennobled by thinking or writing well? Men must be clothed and shaved,[622] have houses with doors that shut close; but where is the necessity of their being well informed? It were folly, simplicity, stupidity, continues Antisthenes, to set up for an author or a philosopher! Get me, if possible, some lucrative post which may make my life easy, enable me to lend some money to a friend, and give to those who cannot return it; and then I can write for recreation or indolently, just as Tityrus[623] whistles or plays on the flute; Iʼll have that or nothing, and will write on those conditions; I will yield to the violence of those who take me by the throat and exclaim, “You shall write!” I have the title of my new book ready for them: “Of beauty, goodness, truth, ideas, of first principles, by Antisthenes, a fishmonger.”