d reality which is the basis of his character, that by an unhappy
association of ideas he has acquired a repugnance to the writers
themselves. But such men as Horace, Terence, Shakespeare, Moliere,
though they have had the misfortune to be praised and commentated upon
by pedants, were in their lives the precise opposite of pedants; they
were _artists_ whose study was human nature, and who lived without
pretension in the common world of men. The pedants have a habit of
considering these genial old artists as in some mysterious way their own
private property, for do not the pedants live by expounding them? And
some of us are frightened away from the fairest realms of poetry by the
fences of these grim guardians.

LETTER X.

TO AN AUTHOR WHO KEPT VERY IRREGULAR HOURS.

Julian Fane--His late hours--Regularity produced by habit--The time of
the principal effort--That the chief work should be done in the best
hours--Physicians prefer early to late work--The practice of Goethe
and some modern authors--The morning worker ought to live in a
tranquil neighborhood--Night-work--The medical objection to it--The
student's objection to day-work--Time to be kept in masses by adults,
but divided into small portions by children--Rapid turning of the
mind--Cuvier eminent for this faculty--The Duke of Wellington--The
faculty more available with some occupations than others--The slavery
of a minute obedience to the clock--Broad rules the best--Books of
agenda, good in business, but not in the higher intellectual pursuits.

What you told me of your habits in the employment of your hours reminded
me of Julian Fane. Mr. Lytton tells us that "after a long day of
professional business, followed by a late evening of social amusement,
he would return in the small hours of the night to his books, and sit,
unwearied, till sunrise in the study of them. Nor did he then seem to
suffer from this habit of late hours. His nightly vigils occasioned no
appearance of fatigue the next day.... He rarely rose before noon, and
generally rose much later."

But however irregular a man's distribution of his time may be in the
sense of wanting the government of fixed rules, there always comes in
time a certain regularity by the mere operation of habit. People who get
up very late hardly ever do so in obedience to a rule; many get up early
by rule, and many more are told that they ought to get up early, and
believe it, and aspire to that