I am half angry with you, not for scolding or half scolding me but because you are doing
what you ought not to attempt without adequate means. Now I am not conscious of having
affected to be "a busy man"Hone is responding to Wilson's language in his [letter of 17 January, 1823](1823-01-17-frWilson.html). [[return]](#a) — but I have had the business of others thrust upon me,
to the occupation of time that ought to have been devoted to my own, and "in my sear and
yellow leaf"Macbeth
(V.iii.23). [[return]](#b) I am seeking fresh sap to put forth a
few branches for the protection of my family. Yet you I
acquit wholly from having been on of these depredations on the "stuff that life is made
of" — but I am compelled to say NO for the first time
almost I ever did to an old friend, and that simply because I cannot say Yes without
injury to my self of which you can scarcely form a notion. Still I cannot forbear to
exemplify by telling you that my work on "the mysteries"[Ancient Mysteries
Described](../../bibliographical/annotated.html#AMD-23), which Hone was about to publish. [[return]](#c) did not come out at
Christmas as announced, nor can it on the last of this month as positively announced, because I literally cannot make the time necessary for its
completion, and I have only about a sheet of it to do.
Concerning "the many things which I have" towards
assisting you in the
Life of Defoe your friend Williams misinformed you.
When I last saw you in town, you entreated me to put together what I could in that way,
and appointed a certain morning to call upon me and see what I had done. Though heavy to
move on a
slight application, yet the name of
[DeFoe] was a "word of power" and in
rummaging I employed myself diligently, and till the hour of three on that morning when I
expected you between 9 & 10 very anxiously—waited at hand the whole forenoon
fidgetly—your presence would have been as grateful to me as "the breath of Maia to
the lovesick shepherdess"
from [James Thomson]'s [The Seasons]. [[return]](#d)—but Lo! on sending to
[Ely Place] I
found you had gone off for
[[one word]] which seemed to me as though
you were too anxious for a DeFoeite and I will frankly confess that the disappointment
very much mortified me. By degrees what I had got together were once more dispersed by my
own occasions for reference and the thing is to me as though it were not "
You do not mean to
[London] again till
you have finished the book" — the more to your shame.
"It is impossible" you say, very well, you cannot make a
bad
book I know, but will not make so good a one as you may, and I acknowledge to you that I
take little interest in that which does not interest
you
sufficiently to forsake the "fat contented easy ignorance" of a country town in search of
knowledge that is to be got by seeking for it in London. Were I as you are and with the
same object in view, neither hedge-row elms, nor Christmas festivities nor aught in "bed
or board" I love would detain me from the laborious inquiries essential to its final and
successful accomplishment. The
Life of DeFoe is to be dug for in the
writings of his contemporaries, and where they are in large masses there should you
excavate—at the
[British Museum],
[Sion
College],
[Dr. Williams's]—in short into all public and
private collections you should burrow, and access is easy to all. Without
this the
Life of De Foe will be no more. I thought I knew
you better, and nothing but your own acknowledgement on paper could convince me that you
were about to commit
murder. "Conjure
me by
my love of DeFoe" Fie! fie! I
do love him and so much
better than you
do that I would rather he reposed in his grave with no other record than
[Mr. Chalmers's memoir,]George Chalmers's Life of Daniel De Foe (1785), which was,
until the eventual publication of Wilson's Memoir of the Life and Times of Daniel
De Foe in 1830, the standard biography. [[return]](#e)
and his own works as his imperishable monument, than see his
ghost revised by you who can do so much better, and all that I could wish if you
will You have no right to call upon
[Mr. Dyer](whoswho.html#DyerGeorge), or myself, or any one for assistance,
till you can show that you have spent not 3 but 6 months in London,
alone, seeing no one, and thinking of nothing, but about De Foe. You must have
collected materials of course and the set of the "Review" is a fine block to chip from but
you have not got
all. I mean all that you
can. This is what I quarrel with you for, to excite you to, to
this, and be like the Walter Wilson that I knew a dozen years ago—
he was a fine fellow at a scent, and when the hunt was up would
follow in a steeple chase. Your
power is greater now than it
was then—let your
resolve be equal and we may have a
life of De Foe yet, but not without 6 months of
your life in
London.