CHAPTER XXXVI.
Occupations--Traduttore traditore--Ode to the Mist--Apple and pear--Reviewing--Current literature--Oxford-like manner--A plain story--Ill-regulated mind--Unsnuffed candle--Strange dreams.
I compiled the Chronicles of Newgate; I reviewed books for the Review established on an entirely new principle; and I occasionally tried my best to translate into German portions of the publisher's philosophy.

In this last task I experienced more than one difficulty.

I was a tolerable German scholar, it is true, and I had long been able to translate from German into English with considerable facility; but to translate from a foreign language into your own is a widely different thing from translating from your own into a foreign language; and, in my first attempt to render the publisher into German, I was conscious of making miserable failures, from pure ignorance of German grammar; however, by the assistance of grammars and dictionaries, and by extreme perseverance, I at length overcame all the difficulties connected with the German language.

But, alas! another difficulty remained, far greater than any connected with German--a difficulty connected with the language of the publisher--the language which the great man employed in his writings was very hard to understand; I say in his writings--for his colloquial English was plain enough.

Though not professing to be a scholar, he was much addicted, when writing, to the use of Greek and Latin terms, not as other people used them, but in a manner of his own, which set the authority of dictionaries at defiance; the consequence was that I was sometimes utterly at a loss to understand the meaning of the publisher.
Many a quarter of an hour did I pass at this period, staring at periods of the publisher, and wondering what he could mean, but in vain, till at last, with a shake of the head, I would snatch up the pen, and render the publisher literally into German.