UPON looking into my mother's marriage settlement, in
order to satisfy myself and reader in a point necessary to
be cleared up, before we could proceed any further in this
history;-I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing
I wanted before I had read a day and a half straight for-
wards,-it might have taken me up a month;-which shews
plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history,-
though it be but the history of jack Hickathrift or Tom
Thumb, he knows no more than his heels what lets and
confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way,--r
what a dance he may be led, by one excursion or another,
before all is over. Could a historiographer drive on his his-
tory, as a muleteer drives on his mule,-straight forward;
-for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without
ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or
to the left he might venture to foretell you to an hour
when he should get to his journey's end;-but the thing
is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the
least spirit he will have fifty deviations from a straight line
to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he
can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to him-
self perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more
help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will more-
over have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyrics to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that: -All which both the man and his
mule are quite exempt from. To sum up all; there are
archives at every stage to be looked into, and rolls, records,
documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and
anon calls him back to stay the reading of: -In short, there
is no end of it;-for my own part, I declare I have been at it
these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could,-and
am not yet born: -I have just been able, and that's all, to
tell you when it happened, but not how;-so that you see the
thing is yet far from being accomplished.
These unforeseen stoppages, which I own I had no con-
ception of when I first set out;-but which, I am convinced
now, will rather increase than diminish as I advancer-have
struck out a hint which I am resolved to follow;-and that
is,-not to be in a hurry;-but to go on leisurely, writing
and publishing two volumes of my life every year;-which
ff I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a tolerable
bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as
I live.