Independent Journal, Or, The General Advertiser

The following is said to be a copy of a paper left by the unhappy young gentleman who lately shot himself with two pistols in Queen-Street, Westminster:

'Let the legislature, from mine, and the example of thousands, and, if they will not, let the public at large, deprecate the head that planned, and the heart that executed the baneful and destructive plan of a Lottery.

—Not that I esteem my example to merit the commiseration of numbers, as I ought to have known better than to form such sanguine expectations; but the futile hope of providing, perhaps for a wife and infant family, and giving up a certainty, though too circumscribed to maintain them from starving, for an uncertainty, which, from the advantage taken of the public in that instance, can but rarely prove beneficial.

Life is a jest, a bubble, a vain illusion! all shadow, and merely ideal: less desirable even than a dream! I'll be trifled with it no longer.

Let those who drag along wearily the unwelcome burden, and who have not spirit to lay it down—let them endure its tantalizing!—I'll no more of it.'