Note 3 — LETTER LXII.

When I instituted the Company by giving the tenth of my available property to it, I had, roughly, seventy thousand pounds in money or land, and thirty thousand3 in pictures and books. The pictures and books I do not consider mine, but merely in my present keeping, for the country, or the persons I may leave them to. Of the seventy thousand in substance, I gave away fourteen thousand in that year of the Company’s establishment, (see above, Letter XLIX., p. 2,) and have since lost fifteen thousand by a relation whom I tried to support in business. As also, during my battle with the booksellers, I have been hitherto losing considerably by my books, (last year, for instance, paying three hundred and ninety-eight pounds to my assistant, Mr. Burgess, alone, for plates and woodcutting, and making a profit, on the whole year’s sales, of fifty pounds), and have been living much beyond my income besides, my seventy thousand is reduced to certainly not more than thirty; and it is very clear that I am too enthusiastically carrying out my own principles, and making more haste to be poor than is prudent, at my present date of possible life, for, at my current rate of expenditure, the cell at Assisi, above contemplated as advisably a pious mortification of my luxury, would soon become a necessary refuge for my ‘holy poverty.’ The battle with the booksellers, however, is now nearly won; and the publishing accounts will soon show better balance: what changes in my mode of living may, nevertheless, be soon either exemplary or necessary will be better understood after I have given account of it for a year.