tivity, and he mentions an observation of
Gifford's which is much to my present purpose:--"Gifford, the editor of
the _Quarterly_, who knew the drudgery of writing for a living, once
observed that 'a single hour of composition, won from the business of
the day, is worth more than the whole day's toil of him who works at the
trade of literature: in the one case, the spirit comes joyfully to
refresh itself, like a hart to the water-brooks; in the other, it
pursues its miserable way, panting and jaded, with the dogs of hunger
and necessity behind.'" So Coleridge said that "three hours of leisure,
unalloyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a
change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger
product of what is truly genial than weeks of compulsion." Coleridge's
idea of a profession was, that it should be "some regular employment
which could be carried on so far mechanically, that an average quantum
only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its
faithful discharge." Without in the least desiring to undervalue good
professional work of any kind, I may observe that, to be truly
professional, it ought to be always at command, and therefore that the
average power of the man's intellect, not his rare flashes of highest
intellectual illumination, ought to suffice for it. Professional work
ought always to be plain business work, requiring knowledge and skill,
but not any effort of genius. For example, in medicine, it is
professional work to prescribe a dose or amputate a limb, but not to
discover the nervous system or the circulation of the blood.

If literature paid sufficiently well to allow it, a literary man might
very wisely consider _study_ to be his profession, and not production.
He would then study regularly, say, six hours a day, and write when he
had something to say, and really wanted to express it. His book, when it
came out, would have had time to be properly hatched, and would probably
have natural life in it. Michelet says of one of his books: "Cette
oeuvre a du moins le caractere d'etre venue comme vient toute vraie
creation vivante. Elle s'est faite a la chaleur d'une douce
incubation."[13] It would be impossible, in so short a space, to give a
more accurate description of the natural manner in which a book comes
into existence. A book ought always to be "fait a la chaleur d'une douce
incubation."

But when you make a profession of literature