k to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous,
solitary life.

"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though
allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful
representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety
not to be met with in this world."

_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work.
Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it
neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to
the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in
no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to
the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits
"brought forth with patience" all round.

_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the
sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife,
Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you
with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely
be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces,
represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated
experience of Fielding's very human history.

Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all
imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas
for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he
asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a
lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that
constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is
entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant
be their workmanship.

For this reason books like George Borrow's _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_,
failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the
passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their
natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of
life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life."

Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need
hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two
when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening
years of hazardous political industry he had ke