Note 201 — Chapter VI

Sir Egerton Brydges, Bart., an author who combines a great many of the peculiarities of the two Sir Thomas Urquharts, the father and the son, and who has recorded his experiences in an Autobiography, lays stress in like manner upon this quality of speed in composition. Thus he says of his little novel, Mary de Clifford (published in 1792), "it was written with a fervent rapidity, which no one seems to believe;—begun in October, 1791, and the sheets sent to the press by the post, as fast as they were scribbled." The passage in which he refers to the vexations to which he had been subjected is worth quoting, on account of its similarity to our Sir Thomas's story. "I have suffered," he says, "a hundred times more disappointments, and crosses, and insults, and wrongs, and deprivations, than Chatterton, yet my spirit, though bent and sunk, was never broken. I am calm and defiant, though not hopeful, in proportion as the storm presses me;—and what trials have I not undergone? I do not mean to relate all these trials; it would involve the conduct of obscure individuals, many of whom are still living" (Autobiography, pp. 8, 9).