books, such as Coke upon Littleton, thus
saturating his mind with legal principles which afterward blossomed out
into what the world called remarkable genius. Matthew Hale for years
studied law sixteen hours a day. Speaking of Fox, some one declared
that he wrote "drop by drop." Rousseau says of the labor involved in
his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched,
interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me.
There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe
four or five times before it went to press. . . . Some of my periods I
have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they
were fit to be put to paper."

It is said that Waller spent a whole summer over ten lines in one of
his poems. Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his
painstaking fidelity and persistent application. There is scarcely a
bar in his music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen
times. His favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which
can say to aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'"
Gibbon wrote his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every
morning, summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste
their evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years. Even
Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived, wrote the first
sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied
with it. Burke's famous "Letter to a Noble Lord," one of the finest
things in the English language, was so completely blotted over with
alterations when the proof was returned to the printing-office that the
compositors refused to correct it as it was, and entirely reset it.
Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of Hastings
sixteen times, and Butler wrote his famous "Analogy" twenty times. It
took Virgil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to
write the Aeneid. He was so displeased with the latter that he
attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.

Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and
lonely, married a servant girl. He was sent away from home to act as
errand boy for a music teacher. He absorbed a great deal of
information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a
barber in Vienna. Here he blacked boots for an i