pt the seed warm in his
heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those
seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which
followed his fiftieth birthday.

The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of
all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore,
we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his
thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion
of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_
he had conceived at twenty.

Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation
with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years
translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's _Elegy_
owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which
Gray polished and repolished it through eight years.

If we are to believe Poe's _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I
think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The
Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less
due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their
composition.

But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for
an age of "get-rich-quick" _litterateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he
worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he
was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his
friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to
bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately,
Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the
poet's infanticidal desire.

But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the
great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era
of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic
formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson,
we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense
fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease."

"I cannot compete with that," he says--"what makes me sick is to think
of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks."

Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet
in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must
be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degr