lf as this
very perseverance against weariness."

You understand, no doubt, that there is drudgery in the work of a lawyer
or an accountant, but you imagine that there is no drudgery in that of
an artist, or author, or man of science. In these cases you fancy that
there is nothing but a pleasant intoxication, like the puffing of
tobacco or the sipping of claret after dinner. The Bishop sees more
accurately. He knows that "of _all_ work that produces results
nine-tenths must be drudgery." He makes no exceptions in favor of the
arts and sciences; if he had made any such exceptions, they would have
proved the absence of culture in himself. Real work of all descriptions,
even including the composition of poetry (the most intoxicating of all
human pursuits), contains drudgery in so large a proportion that
considerable moral courage is necessary to carry it to a successful
issue. Some of the most popular writers of verse have dreaded the labor
of composition. Wordsworth shrank from it much more sensitively than he
did from his prosaic labors as a distributor of stamps. He had that
_horreur de la plume_ which is a frequent malady amongst literary men.
But we feel, in reading Wordsworth, that composition was a serious toil
to him--the drudgery is often visible. Let me take, then, the case of a
writer of verse distinguished especially for fluency and ease--the
lightest, gayest, apparently most thoughtless of modern minstrels--the
author of "The Irish Melodies" and "Lalla Rookh." Moore said--I quote
from memory and may not give the precise words, but they were to this
effect--that although the first shadowy imagining of a new poem was a
delicious fool's paradise, the labor of actual composition was something
altogether different. He did not, I believe, exactly use the word
"drudgery," but his expression implied that there was painful drudgery
in the work. When he began to write "Lalla Rookh" the task was anything
but easy to him. He said that he was "at all times a far more slow and
painstaking workman than would ever be guessed from the result." For a
long time after the conclusion of the agreement with Messrs. Longman,
"though generally at work with a view to this task, he made but very
little real progress in it." After many unsatisfactory attempts, finding
that his subjects were so slow in kindling his own sympathies, he began
to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others. "Had this series
of disheartening experiment