sidered one of Dickens's notable successes.

George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years,
_Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda
Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_,
was also written during that period.

George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam
Bede_ cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as
a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the
course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness
and melancholy." _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious
preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to
it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with
the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this
paper, is probably a stranger.

It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully
enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give
it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart,
mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was
something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world,
and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work.

Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in
_Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world
will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was
brilliant.

Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_:

"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in
searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was
there, and which was found there at last."

The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English
language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a
glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied
the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed
to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His
commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was
accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the
notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from
newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled
one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the
inspection of literary