"Then we are all agreed," said Alicia.

the meeting was concluded.

And the real business of

When the guests had departed, Mr. Little ventured into the drawing-room, where he found his wife looking flushed and fatigued. "I am afraid you are very tired, my darling," he said, taking her hand. "But I hope you have enjoyed your friends. Tell me how you got on."

"Well, they all agreed to sign the memorial at last," said Alicia, somewhat dejectedly. "But they disappointed me. Their conversation was not a bit more poetical than-than yours, and their behaviour was less so; for you are always agreeable and polite, and they were all either rude or awkward."

Mr. Little smiled. "You must expect eccentricities from born poets," he remarked.

"Nonsense, my dear," cried Alicia. "They are no more born poets than you are. As for me, I am never going to write a line again— never!"

"Well! was the sonnet of inauguration appreciated?" asked Mr. Little.

"My

"That is a great mystery," said Alicia, in a low voice. poem has vanished, and in its stead I found the most exquisite sonnet of Colin Clout's. How could it have got into my portfolio?" "I put it there, dear one."

"You ?"

"Yes," said Mr. Little. "I know Colin Clout very well, and I got him to write a sonnet, on purpose to please you. You had better give me the memorial to make over to him."

"What!" cried Alicia, at last finding words.

"You know Colin

Clout! Why have you never told me so before, O most unpoetical husband? Why, why have you never introduced him to me?"

"Because he is not the sort of man you like."

"How do you know?" she asked, impatiently. "He is very like me, dearest."

"Impossible!"

Indeed, it is true. We are as like as twin brothers." "I cannot believe it," said Alicia, emphatically.

"But, my darling, listen to me. I have often been on the point of telling you before, but something has always stayed me. I know not whether poets are born or made, but I have written poetry all my life, and now I am proud to tell my wife that her husband is famous, for he is Colin Clout!"

And the poet kissed away the penitent tears that started into Alicia's eyes, and the penitent words that rose to her lips.

GREAT WRITERS AT WORK.

HOW delightful it would be to trace the evolvements of “The

Canterbury Tales," or "The Faerie Queen," from the first germ of conception through its various stages to completion-to learn exactly how it was written, under what circumstances and conditions; whether the ideas easily shaped themselves into words, or whether there was much blotting and erasing and rewriting before it assumed the exquisite form in which we possess the poem.

Much of Chaucer's work was undoubtedly meditated out in the meads, among the flowers, in the early morning. In his portrait of himself, as the clerk of Oxenford, he tells us that he had at his bed's head "twenty bookes clothed in black and red," which certainly indicates that he was addicted to "waste the midnight oil." Chaucer was a busy man of the world, a soldier, a courtier, an envoy. He held offices under the State and sat in Parliament, and probably it was only in the late hours of the night that he found time for literary composition.

Of Spenser we know too little even for conjectures. "The Faërie Queen" is supposed to have been conceived and commenced during his sojourn at Court; but the greater portion was written at Kilcolman, the ancient castle of the proscribed Desmonds, whose lands had been obtained for him through Sydney's interest.

It was a savage, romantic building, rising on the shores of a lake, and the great plain in which it stood was surrounded by distant ranges of wooded mountains. Never was poet's lot cast in a situation more congenial to his task. Within those gray walls the common places of civilization could have had no existence for him. He lived in a world of romance and superstition, peopled by the eerie creatures of the wild Celtic fancy: he wandered daily in the gloomy forests he described, where every ruin, and cave, and weird haunt had its legend. Amidst such scenes the beautiful, the terrible, and the grotesque forms of his imagination must have become more real to him than the realities of that artificial world of man from which he was so utterly separated.

What would we not give to know how Shakspeare's masterpieces were composed to trace "Macbeth" or "Lear," "Othello " or " Hamlet," from its first suggestion to its perfect form! Probably we should be disappointed by its simplicity, for, of all men of genius, Shakspeare appears to have had the least of eccentricity or strangeness. The greater number of his plays were written in London-or, at least, evidence is in favour of such a conclusion, for with the scanty information we possess we can never pronounce with certainty upon any

points that relate to Shakspeare-written amidst the prosaic duties of theatre-manager and actor. We know that he was a lover of society and of good cheer, that he liked to spend his evenings at "The Devil" or "The Mermaid." These duties and recreations must have left him little time for composition-only the late hours of the night or the early morning. It is said that he never blotted a line: perhaps each one was perfected before it was committed to paper.

We all know how "Paradise Lost" was written. There is no more distinct picture of the author at work in literary history than that of the severe figure of the blind poet giving forth his immortal utterances to the pens of his daughters. "When he first rose," says Johnson," he heard a chapter in the Hebrew Bible, and then studied till twelve; then took some exercise for an hour, then dined; then played on the organ, and sang, or heard another sing; then studied till six; then entertained his visitors till eight, then supped; and, after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water, went to bed. When he did not care to rise early he had something read to him by his bedside; perhaps at this time his daughters were employed. He composed much in the morning, and dictated in the day, sitting obliquely in a chair, with his leg thrown over the arm."

How Dryden, the next great poet in succession, worked, I cannot find recorded; doubtless at any time and all times, whenever the need of money pressed him. Pope always required his writing-desk to be set upon his bed before he rose. Gray, the author of the Elegy, was perhaps of all writers the most curiously minute in his method it is said that he perfected each line separately, amending and rewriting it over and over again, and never commenced another until the first had wholly satisfied his fastidious taste.

Byron sat down to write without any premeditation: his ideas flowed with his ink, and one line suggested the next. But after the poem was completed, and during its passage through the press, he was continually altering, interlining, and adding. The first copy of "The Giaour" consisted of only four hundred lines; to each new edition were added new passages, until it swelled to nearly fourteen hundred lines. During the printing of "The Bride of Abydos" he added two hundred lines, and many of the original were altered again and again.

One of the most constantly laborious writers of whom we have any account was Southey. In one of his letters he says: "Imagine me n this great study of mine (at Gesta Hall, Keswick) from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, and from tea till supper, in my old black coat, my corduroys alternated with the long worsted pantaoons and gaiters in one, and the green shade, and sitting at my desk, and you have my picture and my history. My actions are as regular as those of Saint Dunstan's quarter bags. Three pages of history after breakfast; then to transcribe and copy for press, or to make my selections and biographies, or what else suits my humour

...

till dinner time; from dinner till tea I read, write letters, see the newspaper, and very often indulge in a siesta. After tea I go to poetry, and correct and rewrite and copy till I am tired, and then turn to anything till supper; and this is my life, which, if it be not a merry one, is yet as happy as heart could wish."

In striking contrast to this wholly sedentary life was that of his neighbour and fellow poet, Wordsworth. His poems were composed during his long morning walks upon the mountains, surrounded by the scenery, the objects, and the incidents they describe, which thus visually inspired and wrought out his conceptions. Upon returning home he would go to bed, and while eating his breakfast dictate to an amanuensis.

To pass from the poets to the prose writers, Johnson's method was to thoroughly think out his subject before he put pen to paper, not only in its salient points, but word for word as it was to appear in print, which must have been a great effort of memory to begin with. Mr. Trevelyan gives the following account of how Macaulay wrote his history: "As soon as he had got into his head any particular episode in his history, he would sit down and write off the whole story at a headlong pace, sketching in the outlines under the genial and audacious impulse of a first conception, and securing in black and white each idea, and epithet, and turn of phrase, as it flowed straight from his busy brain to his rapid fingers. His manuscript, at this stage, to the eyes of anyone but himself, appeared to consist of column after column of dashes and flourishes, in which a straight line with a halfformed letter at each end and another in the middle, did duty for a word. . . . As soon as Macaulay had finished his rough draft, he began to fill it in at the rate of six sides of foolscap every morning; written in so large a hand, and with such a multitude of erasures, that the whole six pages were on an average compressed into two pages of print. This portion he called his 'task,' and he was never quite easy unless he completed it daily. More he seldom sought to accomplish; for he had learned by long experience that this was as much as he could do at his best; and except at his best he never would write at all." He never wrote except he was in the humour, and stopped as soon as his thoughts ceased to flow fast. He never allowed a sentence to pass until it was as good as he could make it. He would recast a chapter to obtain a more lucid arrangement, and reconstruct a paragraph for the sake of one happy stroke or apt illustration. He spent nineteen days over his description of the Massacre of Glencoe, and then expressed dissatisfaction at the result.

There could be no more notable antithesis to this elaborate method than that of Sir Walter Scott. He wrote with marvellous rapidity; his pen was never stopped by the want of a word. If it did not come readily he left a blank space and sped on to the rest. Correction was distasteful to him, and as the ideas flowed from his brain they were set down and never altered. He could write while children were

playing about the room, and amidst conversation or almost any disturbing influence.

Fanny Kemble, in the "Records of My Girlhood," tells a good story in illustration of this. "I can never forget the description Sir Adam Fergusson gave me of a morning he had passed with Scott at Abbotsford, which at that time was still unfinished, swarming with carpenters, painters, masons, and bricklayers, and surrounded with all the dirt and disorderly discomfort inseparable from the process of house-building. The room they sat in was in the roughest condition' which admitted of their occupying it at all: the raw, new chimney smoked intolerably. Out of doors the place was one mass of bricks, mortar, scaffolding, tiles, and slates. A heavy mist shrouded the whole landscape of lovely Tweedside, and distilled in a cold, persistent, and dumb drizzle. Maida, the well-beloved staghound, kept fidgetting in and out of the room, Walter Scott every five minutes exclaiming, Eh, Adam, the puir beasti's just wearyin' to get out;' or 'Eh, Adam, the puir creature's just crying to come in ;' when Sir Adam would open the door to the raw, chilly air, for the wet, muddy hound's exit or entrance, while Scott, with his face swollen with a grievous toothache, and one hand pressed hard to his cheek, with the other was writing the inimitably humorous opening chapters of 'The Antiquary,' which he passed across the table sheet by sheet to his friend, saying, 'Now, Adam, d'ye think that'll do ?'"

Contrast with this Lord Lytton's mode of working. His study, richly furnished in the Elizabethan style, was isolated from the rest of the house, so that the least noise, which would have irritated him in the extreme, might be intercepted. While writing, the floor around him would be strewn with books and papers, and so jealous was he of the privacy of this sanctum that few were ever admitted within its walls. In his latter days he never devoted more than three hours to composition. After partaking in abstracted silence of a light breakfast, he would enter his study at ten, and regularly as the clock struck one he would emerge, and his labours were finished for the day.

Dickens was a very methodical worker; his usual hours of writing were between breakfast and luncheon. But his marvellously active brain was ceaselessly employed in collecting materials. Nothing escaped his keen eye-not an odd name over a shop door, not a peculiar face, or a peculiar expression heard in passing through the streets, or the commonest incidents, whether appertaining to man or beast; all were absorbed into the vast store-house of his mind, to be blended with other reminiscences, or with original ideas; to be transfused, sublimated, and reproduced in other forms thereafter.

This is Mrs. Gaskell's account of the Brontë sisters' mode of working: "It was the household custom among the girls to sew till nine o'clock at night. At that hour Miss Bramwell generally went to bed, and her nieces' duties were accounted done. They put away their work, and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and