his departure for London in 1823 was the busiest period of his life as he juggled overlapping careers in editorship, journalism, poetry, novels, law study, and later, law practice. During this period he taught himself to read and write in eleven languages, published seven books, read law for four years, completed an independent course of law study in eighteen months that was designed to be completed in seven-to-eight years, earned admission to the bar in a community known for rigorous requirements, and contributed prodigiously to newspapers and literary magazines, two of which he edited at different points. Two months after Neal's bankruptcy trial, he submitted his first contribution to The Portico and quickly became the magazine's second-most prolific contributor of poems, essays, and literary criticism, though he was never paid. Two years later he took over as editor for what ended up being the last issue. The magazine was closely associated with the Delphian Club, which he founded in 1816 with Dr. Tobias Watkins, John Pierpont, and four other men. Neal felt indebted to this "high-minded, generous, unselfish" association of "intellectual and companionable" people for many of the happy memories and employment connections he enjoyed in Baltimore. While writing his earliest poetry, novels, and essays he was studying law as an unpaid apprentice in the office of William H. Winder, a fellow Delphian. Neal's business failure had left him without enough "money to take a letter from the post-office", so Neal "cast about for something better to do... and, after considering the matter for ten minutes or so, determined to try my hand at a novel." When he wrote his first book, fewer than seventy novels had been published by "not more than half a dozen [American] authors; and of these, only Washington Irving had received more than enough to pay for the salt in his porridge." Neal was nevertheless inspired by Pierpont's financial success with his poem The Airs of Palestine (1816) and encouraged by the reception of his initial submissions to The Portico. He resolved that "there was nothing left for me but authorship, or starvation, if I persisted in my plan of studying law". Composing his first and only bound volume of poetry was Neal's nighttime distraction from laboring sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for more than four months to produce an index for six years of weekly publications of Hezekiah Niles's Weekly Register