The fact, however, is, as almost everybody who
knows me can bear witness, that I have never
enjoyed facilities absolutely necessary to such elabo-
rate trickery. I have not only wanted time and



Mr. Hamilton's Inquiry. 33

skill, but place and means. I was married forty-four
years ago, and in five out of the eight houses I have
since occupied I never had a study to myself: my
dwellings were too small and my family too large
to allow of it. The common eating-room was there-
fore my common writing-room, liable to all sorts of
interruptions, through which, by long habit, I con-
tinued my occupations ; and if it were possible to
accumulate into one point of view all that my pen
then produced, by day and by night, people would
be astonished at the mass of writing which, by the
exercise of unwonted mental energy and power of
Lbstraction, I was able to accomplish. I was always
hard-working man, and often was called upon to
jrform tasks I would fain have avoided. When I
lave had a study, I defy the world to show that I
>ver turned the key to prevent intrusion : everybody
ras admitted, and at all hours. Such impositions
as are charged against me could not be attempted
without seclusion and secresy ; yet I had no secrets :
my wife opened every letter I received ; and in my
study was always kept a chest of drawers to which
every member of the family had access for some of
the most ordinary requirements.*

Therefore upon nobody could this charge of
fraud and forgery against me have come with
greater astonishment than upon my children: if my
wife had lived, I believe, it would have killed her to
have known that such a base accusation had been

* I cannot forbear quoting here a brief passage from the
letter of an old friend of eighty-four, now residing in the west
of England, who, many years since, called upon me for a
literary purpose. He is speaking of my " Reply," as it appeared
in the Athenceum of 18 th Feb. : — " The paragraph in your letter

D



34 Mr. J. Payne Collier^s Reply to

kept hanging over her husband's head for eight
months, when she was well aware that it could be
refuted in about as many minutes.
