low their advice in its simplicity.
Goethe wrote in the morning, with his faculties refreshed by sleep and
not yet excited by any stimulant. I could mention several living authors
of eminence who pursue the same plan, and find it favorable alike to
health and to production. The rule which they follow is never to write
after lunch, leaving the rest of their time free for study and society,
both of which are absolutely necessary to authors. According to this
system it is presumed that the hours between breakfast and lunch are the
best hours. In many cases they are so. A person in fair health, after
taking a light early breakfast without any heavier stimulant than tea or
coffee, finds himself in a state of freshness highly favorable to sound
and agreeable thinking. His brain will be in still finer order if the
breakfast has been preceded by a cold bath, with friction and a little
exercise. The feeling of freshness, cleanliness, and moderate
exhilaration, will last for several hours, and during those hours the
intellectual work will probably be both lively and reasonable. It is
difficult for a man who feels cheerful and refreshed, and whose task
seems easy and light, to write anything morbid or perverse.

But for the morning to be so good as I have just described it, the
workman must be quite favorably situated. He ought to live in a very
tranquil neighborhood, and to be as free as possible from anxiety as to
what the postman may have in reserve for him. If his study-window looks
out on a noisy street, and if the day is sure, as it wears on, to bring
anxious business of its own, then the increasing noise and the
apprehension (even though it be almost entirely unconscious) of
impending business, will be quite sufficient to interfere with the work
of any man who is the least in the world nervous, and almost all
intellectual laborers _are_ nervous, more or less. Men who have the
inestimable advantage of absolute tranquillity, at all times, do well to
work in the morning, but those who can only get tranquillity at times
independent of their own choice have a strong reason for working at
those times, whether they happen to be in the morning or not.

In an excellent article on "Work" (evidently written by an experienced
intellectual workman), which appeared in one of the early numbers of the
_Cornhill Magazine_, and was remarkable alike for practical wisdom and
the entire absence of traditional dogmatism, the writer speaks frankl