Or is it that you wrote in a querulous mood, when you said those sharp things about your grey goose quill.
Surely composition must be pleasant to you.

No one who writes so fast and so well can find it actually irksome.

I am aware that people sometimes think they find it so.

But we may deceive ourselves on the dark as well as on the bright side of our road, and more easily, because it _is_ the dark.

That is to say, we may not only cheat ourselves with false hopes of good, but with false notions of evil, which proves, if it proves anything just now, that you are considerably mistaken when you fancy writing to be a bore, and that I know infinitely better than you do what you like or dislike." It is rather singular to find a literary _workman_ talking in this style.