Richard, like other authors, found no literature so good to his palate as his own; and while his stories looked well enough when he wrote them, the types never failed in uncovering charms that had escaped his ken.

These were complacent days for Richard the defective; ones to nourish his self-love.
Being his first work, and performed under his own tolerant mastery, with none to molest him or make him editorially afraid, it stood scant wonder that he went about the subject of his own sleepless self-congratulations.

What Richard needed--and never knew it--was dismissal in rapid succession from at least four newspapers; such a course of journalistic sprouts would have set his feet in proper paths.
Under the circumstances, however, this improving experience was impossible; missing the benefits thereof, Richard must struggle on as best he might without a bridle.
It was fortunate, when one remembers his blinded ignorance, a condition aggravated by his own acute approval of himself, that Richard had a no more radical guide than was the cautious Senator Hanway.

While that designing gentleman--the _Daily Tory_ turning the stone--grinded many a personal ax--_note bene_, never once without exciting the sophisticated wrath of the editor-in-chief--he was no such headlong temper of a man as to invite the paper into foolish extravagancies, whether of statement or of style.

As the bug under the chip of the _Daily Tory's_ Washington correspondence, Senator Hanway was neither a vindictive nor yet a reckless bug; and the paper, while it became the organ of his ambitions, made some reputational profit by the very melody of those guarded tunes he ground.
Richard, you are not to suppose, went unaware of those employments to which Senator Hanway put him in the vineyard of his policies.