In past years, and even almost from boyhood, I was perpetually prone to exclaim with Cowley: "What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the age to come my own ?" But I had endeavoured for ten years, and was as far from approaching my object as ever.

Everything I wrote fell dead-born from the press.

Very often I was disposed to quit the enterprise in despair.

But still I felt ever and anon impelled to repeat my effort.
At length I conceived the plan of Political Justice.

I was convinced that my object of building to myself a name would never be attained by merely repeating and refining a little upon what other men had said, even though I should imagine that I delivered things of this sort with a more than usual point and elegance.