avaricious man is to spend no more money than he can help.
An artist who taught me painting often repeated a piece of advice which
is valuable in other things than art, and which I try to remember
whenever patience fails. He used to say to me, "_Give it time._" The
mere length of time that we bestow upon our work is in itself a most
important element of success, and if I object to the use of languages
that we only half know, it is not because it takes us a long time to get
through a chapter, but because we are compelled to think about syntax
and conjugations which did not in the least occupy the mind of the
author, when we ought rather to be thinking about those things which
_did_ occupy his mind, about the events which he narrated, or the
characters that he imagined or described. There are, in truth, only two
ways of impressing anything on the memory, either intensity or duration.
If you saw a man struck down by an assassin, you would remember the
occurrence all your life; but to remember with equal vividness a picture
of the assassination, you would probably be obliged to spend a month or
two in copying it. The subjects of our studies rarely produce an
intensity of emotion sufficient to ensure perfect recollection without
the expenditure of time. And when your object is not to learn, but to
produce, it is well to bear in mind that everything requires a certain
definite time-outlay, which _cannot_ be reduced without an inevitable
injury to quality. A most experienced artist, a man of the very rarest
executive ability, wrote to me the other day about a set of designs I
had suggested. "If I could but get the TIME,"--the large capitals are
his own,--"for, somehow or other, let a design be never so studiously
simple in the masses, it _will_ fill itself as it goes on, like the
weasel in the fable who got into the meal-tub; and when the pleasure
begins in attempting tone and mystery and intricacy, _away go the hours
at a gallop_." A well-known and very successful English dramatist wrote
to me: "When I am hurried, and have undertaken more work than I can
execute in the time at my disposal, I am always perfectly paralyzed."

There is another side to this subject which deserves attention. Some men
work best under the sense of pressure. Simple compression evolves heat
from iron, so that there is a flash of fire when a ball hits the side
of an ironclad. The same law seems to hold good in the intellectual life
of man, whenever he n