eeds the stimulus of extraordinary excitement.
Rossini positively advised a young composer never to write his overture
until the evening before the first performance. "Nothing," he said,
"excites inspiration like necessity; the presence of a copyist waiting
for your work, and the view of a manager in despair tearing out his hair
by handfuls. In Italy in my time all the managers were bald at thirty. I
composed the overture to 'Othello' in a small room in the Barbaja
Palace, where the baldest and most ferocious of managers had shut me up
by force with nothing but a dish of maccaroni, and the threat that I
should not leave the place alive until I had written the last note. I
wrote the overture to the 'Gazza Ladra' on the day of the first
performance, in the upper loft of the La Scala, where I had been
confined by the manager, under the guard of four scene-shifters who had
orders to throw my text out of the window bit by bit to copyists, who
were waiting below to transcribe it. In default of music I was to be
thrown out myself."

I have quoted the best instance known to me of this voluntary seeking
after pressure, but striking as it is, even this instance does not
weaken what I said before. For observe, that although Rossini deferred
the composition of his overture till the evening before the first
performance, he knew very well that he could do it thoroughly in the
time. He was like a clever schoolboy who knows that he can learn his
lesson in the quarter of an hour before the class begins; or he was like
an orator who knows that he can deliver a passage and compose at the
same time the one which is to follow, so that he prefers to arrange his
speech in the presence of his audience. Since Rossini always allowed
himself all the time that was necessary for what he had to do, it is
clear that he did not sin against the great time-necessity. The express
which can travel from London to Edinburgh in a night may leave the
English metropolis on Saturday evening although it is due in Scotland on
Sunday, and still act with the strictest consideration about time. The
blameable error lies in miscalculation, and not in rapidity of
performance.

Nothing _wastes_ time like miscalculation. It negatives all results. It
is the parent of incompleteness, the great author of the Unfinished and
the Unserviceable. Almost every intellectual man has laid out great
masses of time on five or six different branches of knowledge which are
not of the