From the high eulogium in which he indulges, it
is evident this was one of his favorite volumes while in prison: and
indeed it is an admirable text-book for meditation under adversity. It
is the legacy of a noble and enduring spirit, purified by sorrow and
suffering, bequeathing to its successors in calamity the maxims of
sweet morality, and the trains of eloquent but simple reasoning, by
which it was enabled to bear up against the various ills of life. It
is a talisman, which the unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or,
like the good King James, lay upon his nightly pillow.
After closing the volume, he turns its contents over in his mind,
and gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune,
the vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken him
even in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing to
matins; but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seems
to him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit of
poetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation: he
therefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross to
implore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy land of
poetry.
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