Chapter VI: Part 6

Excellence is not matured in a day, and the cost of it is an old story. The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways. It took Virgil, it is stated, three years to compose his ten short eclogues; seven years to elaborate his Georgics, which comprise little more than two thousand verses; and he employed more than twelve years in polishing his AEneid, being even then so dissatisfied with it, that he wished before his death to commit it to the flames. Horace was equally indefatigable, and there are single odes in his works which must have cost him months of labor. Lucretius's one poem represents the toil of a whole life-time. Thucydides was twenty years writing his history, which is comprised in one octavo volume. Gibbon wrote the first chapter of his work three times before he could please himself. Montesquieu, alluding in a letter to one of his works, says to his correspondent, "You will read it in a few hours, but the labor expended on it has whitened my hair." Henri Beyle transcribed his History of Painting in Italy seventeen times. Sainte-Beuve often spent a whole week on two or three octavo pages. Gray was so fastidious in polishing and perfecting his Elegy, that he kept it nearly twenty years, touching it up and improving it. There is a poem of ten lines in Waller's works, which he himself informs us, took him a whole summer to put into shape. Malherbe would spoil half a quire of paper in composing and discomposing and recomposing a stanza. It is reckoned that during the twenty-five most prolific years of his life he composed no more than, on the average, thirty-three verses per annum. There is a good story told of him, which illustrates amusingly the elaborate care he took with his poems. A certain nobleman of his acquaintance had lost his wife, and was anxious that Malherbe should dedicate an ode to her memory, and condole with him in verse on the loss he had sustained. Malherbe complied, but was so fastidious in his composition, that it was three years before the elegy was completed. Just before he sent it in, he was intensely chagrined to find that his noble friend had solaced himself with a new bride, and was, consequently, in no humor to be pestered with an elegy on his old one. When dying, his confessor, in speaking of the happiness in heaven, expressed himself inaccurately. "Say no more about it," said Malherbe, "or your style will disgust me with it." Miss Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Hume, and Fox, have all recorded the trouble they took. Tasso was unwearied in correcting; so were Pope and Boileau. The Cambridge manuscript of Milton's Lycidas shows numerous erasures and interlineations. Pascal spent twenty days in perfecting a single letter. The fables of La Fontaine were copied and re-copied over and over again. Alfieri was laboriously painstaking in composition. We are told that if he approved of his first sketch of a piece--after laying it by for some time, nor approaching it again until his mind was free of the subject--he submitted it to what he called "development"--writing out in prose the indicated scenes, with all the force at his command, but without stopping to analyze a thought or correct an expression. He then proceeded to verify at his leisure the prose he had written, selecting with care the ideas he thought best, and rejecting those which he deemed unworthy of a place. Nor did he even yet regard his work as finished, but incessantly polished it verse by verse, and made continual alterations. Moliere composed very slowly, although he liked the contrary to be understood, and many pieces supposed to have been written upon the spur of a royal command, had been prepared some time previously. He said to Boileau, "I have never done anything with which I am truly content." Sheridan, when urged by the publisher, Ridgeway, to finish his manuscript of The School for Scandal, declared that he had been nineteen years endeavoring to satisfy himself with the style of it, but had not succeeded. Joubert had a habit from his twentieth year to his seventieth, of jotting down with pencil the best issues of his meditation as they arose; and out of this chaos of notes was shaped, many years after his death, a full volume of Thoughts, "which," says the translator, "from their freshness and insight, their concise symmetry of expression, their pithiness, their variety, make a rich, enduring addition to the literature of France, and to all literature." Addison wore out the patience of his printer; frequently, when nearly a whole impression of a Spectator was worked off, he would stop the press to insert a new preposition. Lamb's most sportive essays were the result of most intense labor; he used to spend a week at a time in elaborating a single humorous letter to a friend. Tennyson is reported to have written Come into the Garden, Maud, more than fifty times over before it pleased him; and Locksley Hall, the first draught of which was written in two days, he spent the better part of six weeks, for eight hours a day, in altering and polishing. Dickens, when he intended to write a Christmas story, shut himself up for six weeks, lived the life of a hermit, and came out looking as haggard as a murderer. His manuscripts show that he wrote with the greatest care, and scrupulously revised his writing in order to render each sentence as perfect as might be. He made his alterations so carefully that it is difficult to trace the words which he had originally written. In many instances "the primary words have been erased so carefully that it is next to impossible to form an idea of how the passages originally stood." Balzac, after he had thought out thoroughly one of his philosophical romances, and amassed his materials in a most laborious manner, retired to his study, and from that time until his book had gone to press, society saw him no more. When he appeared again among his friends, he looked, said his publisher, in the popular phrase, like his own ghost. The manuscript was afterward altered and copied, when it passed into the hands of the printer, from whose slips the book was re-written for the third time. Again it went into the hands of the printer,--two, three, and sometimes four separate proofs being required before the author's leave could be got to send the perpetually re-written book to press at last, and so have done with it. He was literally the terror of all printers and editors. Moore thought it quick work if he wrote seventy lines of Lalla Rookh in a week. Kinglake's Eothen, we are told, was re-written five or six times, and was kept in the author's writing-desk almost as long as Wordsworth kept the White Doe of Rylstone, and kept like that to be taken out for review and correction almost every day. Buffon's Studies of Nature cost him fifty years of labor, and he re-copied it eighteen times before he sent it to the printer. "He composed in a singular manner, writing on large-sized paper, in which, as in a ledger, five distinct columns were ruled. In the first column he wrote down the first thoughts; in the second, he corrected, enlarged, and pruned it; and so on, until he had reached the fifth column, within which he finally wrote the result of his labor. But even after this, he would re-compose a sentence twenty times, and once devoted fourteen hours to finding the proper word with which to round off a period." John Foster often spent hours on a single sentence. Ten years elapsed between the first sketch of Goldsmith's Traveller and its completion. The poet's habit was to set down his ideas in prose, and, when he had turned them carefully into rhyme, to continue retouching the lines with infinite pains to give point to the sentiment and polish to the verse. La Rochefoucauld spent fifteen years in preparing his little book of Maxims, altering some of them, Segrais says, nearly thirty times. Rogers showed a friend a note to his Italy, which, he said, took him a fortnight to write. It consists of a very few lines. We all know how Sheridan polished his wit and finished his jokes, the same surprising things being found on different bits of paper, differently expressed. Not long before his death Adam Smith told Dugald Stewart that he wrote with just as much difficulty then as when he first began. The Benedictine editor of Bossuet's works stated that his manuscripts were bleared over with such numerous interlineations that they were nearly illegible. Sterne was incessantly employed for six months in perfecting one very diminutive volume. Herrick was a painstaking elaborator: with minute and curious care he polished and strengthened his work: "his airy facility, his seemingly spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley, were earned by conscious labor; perfect freedom was begotten of perfect art." It seems, no doubt, to many a reader of Macaulay's History, as if he wrote without effort, and as if the charms of his style were the gift of nature rather than the product of art, so spontaneously do they appear to flow from his pen. It was the general opinion of his literary friends that he wrote with great rapidity, and made few corrections in his manuscripts. On the contrary, we are told by his nephew and biographer, that he never allowed a sentence to pass until it was as good as he could make it, and would often re-write paragraphs and whole chapters that he might gain even a slight improvement in arrangement or expression. After writing thus carefully, he corrected again remorselessly, and his manuscripts were covered with erasures. He paid equal attention to proof-sheets. "He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water." To Napier, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, he wrote from Calcutta: "At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast." Carlyle, Miss Martineau says, erred on the side of fastidiousness. "Almost every word was altered, and revise followed revise." Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the violin, answered, "Twelve hours a day for twenty years together." Buelow is reported to have said, "If I stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices it." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Titian, we are told, after laying his foundation with a few bold strokes, would turn the picture to the wall, and leave it there perhaps for months, turning it round again after a time to look at it carefully, and scan the parts as he would the face of his greatest enemy. If at this time any portion of it should appear to him to have been defective, he would set to work to correct it, applying remedies as a surgeon would apply them, cutting off excrescences here, superabundant flesh there, redressing an arm, adjusting or setting a limb, regardless of the pain which it might cause. In this way he would reduce the whole to a certain symmetry, put it aside, and return again a third or more times till the first quintessence had been covered over with its padding of flesh. Then came the finishing, which was done at as many more different paintings, to say nothing of the innumerable last touches--with his fingers as well as with his brush--of which he is said to have been particularly fond. It is a received opinion that Edmund Kean's acting was wholly spontaneous and unstudied; this is a mistake. A contemporary, writing of his earlier professional life, says, "He used to mope about for hours, walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him; he studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Neither did he relax his labors when he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. It is related of him, that when studying Maturin's Bertram, he shut himself up for two days to study the one line, "Bertram has kissed the child!" It made one of those electrical effects which from their vividness were supposed to be merely impulsive. His wife said her husband would often stand up all night before a pier glass in his chamber, endeavoring to acquire the right facial expression for some new part. John Kemble's new readings of Hamlet were many and strange, and excited much comment. "The performance was eminently graceful, calm, deep studied--during his life he wrote out the entire part forty times--but cold and unsympathetic." As to orators, the greatest of antiquity were not ashamed to confess the industry of the closet. Demosthenes gloried in the smell of the lamp; and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared his speeches, but even so minutely studied the effect of their delivery, that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated rehearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to incapacitate him in the morning. Lord Erskine corrected and corrected his very eloquent orations, and Burke literally worried his printer into a complaint against the fatigue of his continual revises. Indeed, it is said, such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof-sheet not unfrequently exhibited a complete erasure of the original manuscript. Whitefield's eloquence was a natural gift improved by diligent study; and Garrick said that each repetition of the same sermon showed a constant improvement,--as many as forty repetitions being required before the discourse reached its full perfection. "I composed," says Lord Brougham, "the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four weeks, and I composed it twenty times over at least, and it certainly succeeded in a very extraordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." He says that Erskine wrote down word for word the passage about the savage and his bundle of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and quality of the matured and premeditated composition, retained that impetus, after the impelling cause had died away. Webster, it is said, was in the habit of writing and re-writing most of the fine passages of his senatorial and forensic speeches, and sometimes prepared them, in order that they might afterward be introduced when occasion should offer. He was wont to say that the following passage in his speech upon President Jackson's protest, in May, 1834, had been changed by him twelve times, before he reduced it to a shape that entirely met his approval. Perhaps it is not surpassed, for poetical beauty, by anything that ever fell from his eloquent lips. Speaking of resistance by the United States of the aggressions of Great Britain, he said: "They raised their flag against a power, to which, for the purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared. A power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts--whose morning drum-beat following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

As to compensation, it is stated that Goethe's works were not in his own time commercially successful. After his return from Italy, the edition of his collected works, which he had compared and revised with labor and with care, sold, as his publisher complained, only "very slowly." Coleridge gained little or no money by his writings. He says, "I question whether there ever existed a man of letters so utterly friendless, or so unconnected as I am with the dispensers of contemporary reputation, or the publishers in whose service they labor." When Newton lectured, a Lucasian professor, "so few went to hear him, that ofttimes he did, in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the walls." The Paradise Lost had a very limited sale, till, fifty years after its publication, it was brought into light by the criticisms of Addison. Campbell for years could not find a bookseller who would buy The Pleasures of Hope. In the first thirteen years after the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson, less than four thousand copies were sold. There were only forty-five copies of Hume's History sold in the first twelvemonth. Twelve years elapsed before the first five hundred copies of Emerson's Nature were purchased by the public. Washington Irving was nearly seventy years old before the sale of his works at home met the expenses of his simple life at Sunnyside. It has been related that while Madame Titiens was receiving an ovation for her singing of Kathleen Mavourneen, the author of the song sat weeping in the audience, the poorest and obscurest man present. Willis, breakfasting at the Temple with a friend, met Charles and Mary Lamb. He mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day he was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in his country. "What did you give for it?" said Lamb. "About seven and six-pence." "Permit me to pay you that," said he; and with the utmost earnestness he counted out the money upon the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publishers' ruin."

Fortune, it has been truly said, has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius; others find a hundred by-roads to her palace; there is but one open, and that a very indifferent one, for men of letters. Cervantes, the immortal genius of Spain, is supposed to have wanted bread; Le Sage was a victim of poverty all his life; Camoens, the solitary pride of Portugal, deprived of the necessaries of life, perished in a hospital at Lisbon. The Portuguese, after his death, bestowed on the man of genius they had starved the appellation of Great. Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, to whom Milton was greatly indebted, after composing a number of popular tragedies, lived in great poverty, and died at ninety years of age; then he had his coffin carried by fourteen poets, who, without his genius, probably partook of his wretchedness. The great Tasso was reduced to such a dilemma that he was obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist through the week. He alludes to his dress in a pretty sonnet, which he addresses to his cat, entreating her to assist him, during the night, with the lustre of her eyes, having no candle to see to write his verses. One day Louis the Fourteenth asked Racine what there was new in the literary world. The poet answered that he had seen a melancholy spectacle in the house of Corneille, whom he found dying, deprived even of a little broth. Spenser, the child of Fancy, languished out his life in misery. Lord Burleigh, it is said, prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds, thinking the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person. Sydenham, who devoted his life to a laborious version of Plato, died in a miserable spunging-house. "You," said Goldsmith to Bob Bryanton, "seem placed at the centre of fortune's wheel, and, let it revolve ever so fast, are insensible to the motion. I seem to have been tied to the circumference, and whirled disagreeably round, as if on a whirligig.... Oh gods! gods! here in a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score." To another, about the same time, he wrote, "I have been some years struggling with a wretched being--with all that contempt that indigence brings with it--with all those passions which make contempt insupportable. What, then, has a jail that is formidable? I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true society." Cervantes planned and commenced Don Quixote in prison. John Bunyan wrote the first part, at least, of Pilgrim's Progress in jail. Both of these immortal works are the delight and solace of reading people wherever there is a literature. The latter is said to have been translated into a greater number of languages than any other book in the world, with two exceptions, the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. Sir James Harrington, author of Oceana, on pretense of treasonable practices, was put into confinement, which lasted until he became deranged, when he was liberated. Sir Roger L'Estrange was tried and condemned to death, and lay in prison nearly four years; constantly expecting to be led forth to execution. Ben Jonson, John Selden, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Waller were imprisoned. Sir Walter Raleigh, during his twelve years' imprisonment, wrote his best poems and his History of the World, a work accounted vastly superior to all the English historical productions which had previously appeared. "Written," says the historian Tytler, "in prison, during the quiet evening of a tempestuous life, we feel, in its perusal, that we are the companions of a superior mind, nursed in contemplation and chastened and improved by sorrow, in which the bitter recollection of injury and the asperity of resentment have passed away, leaving only the heavenly lesson, that all is vanity." Old George Wither wrote his Shepherd's Hunting during his first imprisonment. The superiority of intellectual pursuits over the gratification of sense and all the malice of fortune, has never been more touchingly or finely illustrated, it has been well said, than in this poem.

"Can anything be so elegant," asks Emerson, "as to have few wants and serve them one's self? It is more elegant to answer one's own needs than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.... Parched corn, and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, is frugality for gods and heroes." Said Confucius, "With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow,--I have still joy in the midst of these things." "For my own private satisfaction," said Bishop Berkeley, "I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem." "I would rather," said Thoreau, "sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.... If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.... It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety."

"You see in my chamber," said Goethe, near the close of his life, "no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested, and I am placed in an agreeable, but passive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had best be left to people who neither have nor can have any thoughts."

Rogers, the banker poet, once said to Wordsworth, "If you would let me edit your poems, and give me leave to omit some half-dozen, and make a few trifling alterations, I would engage that you should be as popular a poet as any living." Wordsworth's answer is said to have been, "I am much obliged to you, Mr. Rogers; I am a poor man, but I would rather remain as I am."

Thomson solicited Burns to supply him with twenty or thirty songs for the musical work in which he was engaged, with an understanding distinctly specified, that the bard should receive a regular pecuniary remuneration for his contributions. With the first part of the proposal Burns instantly complied, but peremptorily rejected the last. "As to any remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of soul." Thomson, some time after, notwithstanding the prohibition, ventured to acknowledge his services by a small pecuniary present, which the poet with some difficulty restrained himself from returning. "I assure you, my dear sir," he wrote to the donor, "that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savor of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns' integrity--on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you! Burns' character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at least, I will take care that such a character he shall deserve." His sensitive nature inclined him to reject the present, as proud old Sam Johnson threw away with indignation the new shoes which had been placed at his chamber door. "I ought not," says Emerson, "to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort, neither by pride,--and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me."

Isaac Disraeli, when a young man, was informed that a place in the establishment of a great merchant was prepared for him; he replied that he had written and intended to publish a poem of considerable length against commerce, which was the corrupter of man; and he at once inclosed his poem to Dr. Johnson, who, however, was in his last illness, and was unable to read it. Coleridge, on being offered a half share in the Morning Post and Courier, with a prospect of two thousand pounds a year, announced that he would not give up country life, and the lazy reading of old folios, for two thousand times that income. "In short," he added, "beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I regard money as a real evil." Professor Agassiz, when once invited to lecture, replied to the munificent lecture association that he was very sorry, but he was just then busy with some researches that left him no time to make money. There is a familiar story told of Marvell, who is said to have so greatly pleased Charles II. at a private interview, by his wit and agreeable conversation, that the latter dispatched the lord treasurer Danby to offer him a thousand pounds, with a promise of a lucrative place at court, which Marvell refused, notwithstanding he was immediately afterward compelled to borrow a guinea of a friend. Just at the time when the English mind was agitated upon the subject of American taxation, and Goldsmith was most needy, an effort was made to bring him into the ministerial ranks. Dr. Scott was sent to negotiate with the poet. "I found him," said Scott, "in a miserable suite of chambers in the Temple. I told him my authority: I told him I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions; and, would you believe it! he was so absurd as to say, 'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me;' and so I left him in his garret!" Sir John Hawkins one day met Goldsmith; his lordship told him he had read his poem, The Traveller, and was much delighted with it; that he was going lord lieutenant to Ireland, and that hearing that he was a native of that country, he should be glad to do him any kindness. The honest poor man and sincere lover of literature replied that he "had a brother there, a clergyman, that stood in need of help. As for myself, I have no dependence upon the promises of great men; I look to the booksellers for support; they are my best friends, and I am not inclined to forsake them for others." For this frank expression of magnanimity and manly self-dependence, the pricked Hawkins, and the envious Boswell, speaking of the incident afterward, called Goldsmith an "idiot." Some of Walter Scott's friends offered him, or rather proposed to offer him, enough of money, as was supposed, to enable him to arrange with his creditors. He paused for a moment; and then recollecting his powers, said proudly, "No! this right hand shall work it all off!" Lady Blessington said to Willis, Disraeli and Dr. Beattie being present: "Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable appointment. The climate disagreed with him, and he returned home, leaving the business in the hands of a confidential clerk, who embezzled eight thousand pounds in the course of a few months and absconded. Moore's misfortunes awakened a great sympathy among his friends. Lord Lansdowne was the first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for many years he had been in the habit of laying aside from his income eight thousand pounds, for the encouragement of the arts and literature, and that he should feel that it was well disposed of for that year if Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficulties. It was offered in the most delicate and noble manner, but Moore declined it. The members of 'White's' (mostly noblemen) called a meeting, and (not knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in one morning twenty-five thousand pounds, and wrote to the poet that they would cover the sum, whatever it might be. This was declined. Longman and Murray then offered to pay it, and wait for their remuneration from his works. He declined even this, and went to Passy with his family, where he economized and worked hard till it was canceled. At one time two different counties of Ireland sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in Parliament; and as he depended on his writings for a subsistence, offering him at the same time twelve hundred pounds a year while he continued to represent them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and said no circumstance of his life had ever gratified him so much. He admitted that the honor they proposed him had been his most cherished ambition, but the necessity of receiving a pecuniary support at the same time was an insuperable obstacle. He could never enter Parliament with his hands tied, and his opinions and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in such circumstances." Southey was offered by Walter the editorship of The Times, but declined it, saying, "No emolument, however great, would induce me to give up a country life, and those pursuits in literature to which the studies of so many years have been directed." "Will you be created a count? a title is sometimes useful," said Louis Philippe to M. Guizot. The proffered honor was declined, and the king replied, "You are right; your name alone is sufficient, and is a higher dignity." D'Alembert, when in receipt of but a limited income,--more than half of which he gave away in charity,--declined an invitation of Frederick the Great to reside at the court of Berlin. The Empress Catherine offered him the post of tutor or governor to the czarowitch, with an income of one hundred thousand livres, and on his refusal wrote: "I know that your refusal arises from your desire to cultivate your studies and your friendships in quiet. But this is of no consequence; bring all your friends with you, and I promise you, that both you and they shall have every accommodation in my power." Still he refused; the "powers and potentialities of the courts and royalty" being insufficient to seduce his independence. Beranger, the "French Burns," the poet of the people, from 1820 to the end of his life called "the real monarch of France," had the same proud spirit of independence. General Sebastiani, then minister of war, and dangerously ill, received one day a visit from Beranger. "Ah! my dear friend," said the old soldier to the poet, "I am very ill. Come, my dear Beranger, we must do something for our friends. I declare to you that I shall not die quietly if I leave you in poverty behind me. Madame de Praslin has a fortune of her own; therefore it will not be doing any injustice to my children. Listen; I have there in my bureau a few small savings, about two hundred thousand francs; let us divide them. It is an old friend, an old soldier, who offers you this; and I swear, on my cross of honor, that no one shall know the pleasure you will have done me in accepting the small present." The poet refused. Spinoza, at one time, we are informed, did not spend six sous a day, on an average, and did not drink more than a pint of wine in a month. "Nature is satisfied with little," he used to say, "and when she is content, I am so too." A good friend brought him one day a present of two thousand florins. The philosopher, "in the presence of his host, civilly excused himself from accepting the money, saying that he was in need of nothing, and that the possession of so much money would only serve to distract him from his studies and occupations."

Dr. Johnson contracted an inveterate dislike to sustained intellectual exertion, and wondered how any one could write except for money, and never, or very rarely, wrote from any more elevated impulse than the stern pressure of want. "Who will say," says Richard Cumberland, "that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him into a field of clover, he would have lain down and rolled in it. The mere manual labor of writing would not have allowed his lassitude and love of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn, unless the cravings of hunger had reminded him that he must fill the sheet before he saw the table-cloth.... He would have put up prayers for early rising, and lain in bed all day, and with the most active resolutions possible, been the most indolent mortal living.... I have heard that illustrious scholar assert that he subsisted himself for a considerable space of time upon the scanty pittance of four-pence half-penny per day. How melancholy to reflect that his vast trunk and stimulating appetite were to be supported by what will barely feed the weaned infant!" No wonder he so often screened himself when he ate, or, later in life, lost his temper with Mrs. Thrale when she made a jest of hunger!

It is related that soon after the publication of the Life of Savage, which was anonymous, Mr. Walter Harte, dining with Mr. Cave, the proprietor of The Gentleman's Magazine, at St. John's Gate, took occasion to speak very handsomely of the work. The next time Cave met Harte, he told him that he had made a man happy the other day at his home, by the encomiums he bestowed on Savage's Life. "How could that be?" said Harte; "none were present but you and I." Cave replied, "You might observe I sent a plate of victuals behind the screen. There skulked the biographer, one Johnson, whose dress was so shabby that he durst not make his appearance. He overheard our conversation; and your applauding his performance delighted him exceedingly."

"Man," said Goethe, "recognizes and praises only that which he himself is capable of doing; and those who by nature are mediocre have the trick of depreciating productions which, if they have faults, have also good points, so as to elevate the mediocre productions which they are fitted to praise." "While it is so undesirable that any man should receive what he has not examined, a far more frequent danger is that of flippant irreverence. Not all the heavens contain is obvious to the unassisted eye of the careless spectator. Few men are great, almost as few able to appreciate greatness. The critics have written little upon the Iliad in all these ages which Alexander would have thought worth keeping with it in his golden box. Nor Shakespeare, nor Dante, nor Calderon, have as yet found a sufficient critic, though Coleridge and the Schlegels have lived since they did. Meantime," continues Margaret Fuller, "it is safer to take off the hat and shout vivat! to the conqueror, who may become a permanent sovereign, than to throw stones and mud from the gutter. The star shines, and that it is with no borrowed light, his foes are his voucher. And every planet is a portent to the world; but whether for good or ill, only he can know who has science for many calculations. Not he who runs can read these books, or any books of any worth."

Homer was called a plagiarist by some of the earlier critics, and was accused of having stolen from older poets all that was remarkable in the Iliad and Odyssey. Sophocles was brought to trial by his children as a lunatic. Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and Athenaeus as illiterate. Plato was accused of envy, lying, avarice, robbery, incontinence, and impiety. Some of the old writers wrote to prove Aristotle vain, ambitious, and ignorant. Plato is said to have preferred the burning of all of the works of Democritus. Pliny and Seneca thought Virgil destitute of invention, and Quintilian was alike severe upon Seneca. It was a long time, says Seneca, that Democritus was taken for a madman, and before Socrates had any esteem in the world. How long was it before Cato could be understood? Nay, he was affronted, contemned, and rejected; and people never knew the value of him until they had lost him. "The Northern Highlanders," said Wilson, "do not admire Waverley, so I presume the Southern Highlanders despise Guy Mannering. The Westmoreland peasants think Wordsworth a fool. In Borrowdale, Southey is not known to exist. I met ten men at Hawick who did not think Hogg a poet, and the whole city of Glasgow think me a madman. So much for the voice of the people being the voice of God."

Goldsmith tells us, speaking of Waller's Ode on the Death of Cromwell, that English poetry was not then "quite harmonized: so that this, which would now be looked upon as a slovenly sort of versification, was in the times in which it was written almost a prodigy of harmony." At the same time, after praising the harmony of the Rape of the Lock, he observes that the irregular measure at the opening of the Allegro and Penseroso "hurts our English ear." Gray "loved intellectual ease and luxury, and wished as a sort of Mahometan paradise to 'lie on a sofa, and read eternal new romances of Mirivaux and Crebillon.' Yet all he could say of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, when it was first published, was, that there were some good verses in it. Akenside, too, whom he was so well fitted to appreciate, he thought 'often obscure, and even unintelligible.'" Horace Walpole marveled at the dullness of people who can admire anything so stupidly extravagant and barbarous as the Divina Commedia. "The long-continued contempt for Bunyan and De Foe was merely an expression of the ordinary feeling of the cultivated classes toward anything which was identified with Grub Street; but it is curious to observe the incapacity of such a man as Johnson to understand Gray or Sterne, and the contempt which Walpole expressed for Johnson and Goldsmith, while he sincerely believed that the poems of Mason were destined to immortality." The poet Rogers tells us that Henry Mackenzie advised Burns to take for his model in song-writing Mrs. John Hunter! Byron believed that Rogers and Moore were the truest poets among his contemporaries; that Pope was the first of all English, if not of all existing poets, and that Wordsworth was nothing but a namby-pamby driveler. De Quincey speaks of "Mr. Goethe" as an immoral and second-rate author, who owes his reputation chiefly to the fact of his long life and his position at the court of Weimar, and Charles Lamb expressed a decided preference of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to Goethe's immortal Faust. Dr. Johnson's opinion of Milton's sonnets is pretty well known--"those soul-animating strains, alas! too few," as Wordsworth estimated them. Hannah More wondered that Milton could write "such poor sonnets." Johnson said, "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." He attacked Swift on all occasions. He said, speaking of Gulliver's Travels, "When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest." He called Gray "a dull fellow." "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people call him great." Talking of Sterne, he said, "Nothing odd will last long. Tristram Shandy did not last." See how Horace Walpole disposes of some of the gods of literature. "Tiresome Tristram Shandy, of which I could never get through three volumes." "I have read Sheridan's Critic; it appeared wondrously flat and old, and a poor imitation." He speaks of wading through Spenser's "allegories and drawling stanzas." Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he said, are "a lump of mineral from which Dryden extracted all the gold, and converted it into beautiful medals." "Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting: in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." "Montaigne's Travels I have been reading; if I was tired of the Essays, what must one be of these? What signifies what a man thought who never thought of anything but himself? and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" "Boswell's book," he said, "is the story of a mountebank and his zany." Pepys, in his Diary, speaks of having bought "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." Scaliger called Montaigne "a bold ignoramus." Paley used to say that to read Tristram Shandy was the summum bonum of life. Goldsmith said its author was a "block-head." Goethe told a young Italian who asked him his opinion of Dante's great poem, that he thought the Inferno abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Paradiso tiresome. Coleridge, talking of Goethe's Faust, said, "There is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. Moreover, much of it is vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous." "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is, I think," says Southey, "the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw." Johnson told Anna Seward that "he would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of Milton twice." Waller wrote of Paradise Lost on its first appearance, "The old blind school-master, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not considered a merit, it has no other." Curran declared Paradise Lost to be the "worst poem in the language." When Harvey's book on the circulation of the blood came out, "he fell mightily in his practice. It was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him." Who has forgotten the fierce attack of the Quarterly Review on Jane Eyre, in which the unknown author, who was a clergyman's daughter, is pronounced "a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion"? "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all," continues the keen-sighted critic, "we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, forfeited the society of her own sex." Schiller's intimate friends decided against the Indian Death Song, which Goethe afterward pronounced one of his best poems. When Andersen published his Wonder Stories told for Children, which fixed his place in literature and in popular affection, the reviewers advised him to waste no more time over such work; and he said, "I would willingly have discontinued writing them, but they forced themselves from me." Warren says that the first chapter of the Diary of a Late Physician--the Early Struggles,--was offered by him successively to the conductors of three leading London magazines, and rejected, as "unsuitable for their pages," and "not likely to interest the public." Scott tells us that one of his nearest friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder, one of the most comprehensive thinkers and versatile authors of Germany, adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles V. Montesquieu, upon the completion of The Spirit of Laws, which had cost him twenty years of labor, and which ran through twenty-two editions in less than as many months after its publication, submitted the manuscript to Helvetius and Saurin, who returned it with the advice not to spoil a great reputation by publishing it. Wordsworth told Robinson that before his ballads were published, Tobin implored him to leave out We are Seven, as a poem that would damn the book. It turned out to be one of the most popular. That charming and once popular Scottish story, The Annals of the Parish, by John Galt, was written ten or twelve years before the date of its publication, and anterior to the appearance of Waverley and Guy Mannering, and was rejected by the publishers of those works, with the assurance that a novel or work of fiction entirely Scottish would not take with the public. St. Pierre submitted his delightful tale, Paul and Virginia, to the criticisms of a circle of his learned friends. They told him that it was a failure; that to publish it would be a piece of foolishness; that nobody would read it. St. Pierre appealed from his learned critics to his unlearned but sympathetic and sensible housekeeper. He read--she listened, admired, and wept. He accepted her verdict, and will be remembered by one little story longer than his contemporaries by their weary tomes. Moliere made use of a person of the same class to criticise his plays. "I remember," says Boileau, "his pointing out to me several times an old servant that he had, to whom he told me he sometimes read his comedies, and he assured me that when the humorous passages did not strike her, he altered them, because he had frequently proved that such passages did not take upon the stage."

It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a conversation with one of his friends, gave an account of the origin of the Ancient Mariner. It was written in Devonshire, where he and Coleridge were together. It was intended for the Monthly Magazine, and was to pay the expenses of a journey. It was to have been a joint work, but Wordsworth left the execution to Coleridge, after suggesting much of the plan. The idea of the crime was suggested by a book of travels, in which the superstition of the sailors with regard to the albatross is mentioned. Mark Lemon, it is said, loved to tell an anecdote which related to the period when Hood became a contributor to Punch. Looking over his letters one morning, he opened an envelope inclosing a poem which the writer said had been rejected by three contemporaries. If not thought available for Punch, he begged the editor, whom he knew but slightly, to consign it to the waste-paper basket, as the writer was "sick at the sight of it." The poem was signed "Tom Hood," and the lines were entitled "The Song of the Shirt." The work was altogether different from anything that had ever appeared in Punch, and was considered so much out of keeping with the spirit of the periodical that at the weekly meeting its publication was opposed by several members of the staff. Lemon was so firmly impressed, not only with the beauty of the work, but with its suitableness, that he stood by his first decision and published it. The Song of the Shirt trebled the sale of the paper, and created a profound sensation throughout Great Britain. Scott told Ticknor that he once traveled with Campbell in a stage-coach alone, and that, to beguile the time, they talked of poetry and began to repeat some. At last Scott asked Campbell for something of his own, and he said there was one thing he had written but never printed that was full of "drums and trumpets and blunderbusses and thunder," and he didn't know if there was anything good in it. And then he repeated Hohenlinden. Scott listened with the greatest interest, and when he had finished, broke out, "But do you know that's devilish fine; why it's the finest thing you ever wrote, and it must be printed!" Scott told Leslie that he had known a laboring man who was with Burns when he turned up the mouse with his plow. Burns' first impulse was to kill it, but checking himself, as his eye followed the little creature, he said, "I'll make that mouse immortal!"

"One meets now and then with polished men," says Emerson, "who know everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they would?" Wrote Byron:--

"Many are poets who have never penned
Their inspiration, and perchance the best;
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner things; they compressed
The god within them, and rejoined the stars
Unlaureled upon earth."