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356 sudden and fatal sickness, how would his last hours be embittered by the thought, that he was about to depart forever, leaving the world utterly unprovided with the knowledge of what were the precise texture and hue of the first trowsers he wore. These representations did certainly touch him in a very tender spot, not previously unknown to the schoolmaster. But when Pierre considered, that owing to his extreme youth, his own recollections of the past soon merged into all manner of half-memories and a general vagueness, he could not find it in his conscience to present such materials to the impatient biographers, especially as his chief verifying authority in these matters of his past career, was now eternally departed beyond all human appeal. His excellent nurse Clarissa had been dead four years and more. In vain a young literary friend, the well-known author of two Indexes and one Epic, to whom the subject happened to be mentioned, warmly espoused the cause of the distressed biographers; saying that however unpleasant, one must needs pay the penalty of celebrity; it was no use to stand back; and concluded by taking from the crown of his hat the proof-sheets of his own biography, which, with the most thoughtful consideration for the masses, was shortly to be published in the pamphlet form, price only a shilling.

It only the more bewildered and pained him, when still other and less delicate applicants sent him their regularly printed Biographico-Solicito Circulars, with his name written in ink; begging him to honour them and the world with a neat draft of his life, including criticisms on his own writings; the printed circular indiscriminately protesting, that undoubtedly he knew more of his own life than any other living man; and that only he who had put together the great works of Glendinning could be fully qualified thoroughly to analyse them, and cast