now that Melanchthon was in his library hard at
work by two or three o'clock in the morning both in summer and winter,
and that Sir William Jones began his studies with the dawn.

The most popular female writer of America, whose great novel struck a
chord of universal sympathy throughout the civilized world, has habits
of composition peculiarly her own, and unlike those belonging to any
author of whom we have record. She _croons_, so to speak, over her
writings, and it makes very little difference to her whether there is a
crowd of people about her or whether she is alone during the composition
of her books. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was wholly prepared for the press in a
little wooden house in Maine, from week to week, while the story was
coming out in a Washington newspaper. Most of it was written by the
evening lamp, on a pine table, about which the children of the family
were gathered together conning their various lessons for the next day.
Amid the busy hum of earnest voices, constantly asking questions of the
mother, intent on her world-renowned task, Mrs. Stowe wove together
those thrilling chapters which were destined to find readers in so many
languages throughout the globe. No work of similar importance, so far as
we know, was ever written amid so much that seemed hostile to literary
composition.

I had the opportunity, both in England and America, of observing the
literary habits of Thackeray, and it always seemed to me that he did his
work with comparative ease, but was somewhat influenced by a custom of
procrastination. Nearly all his stories were written in monthly
instalments for magazines, with the press at his heels. He told me that
when he began a novel he rarely knew how many people were to figure in
it, and, to use his own words, he was always very shaky about their
moral conduct. He said that sometimes, especially if he had been dining
late and did not feel in remarkably good-humor next morning, he was
inclined to make his characters villanously wicked; but if he rose
serene with an unclouded brain, there was no end to the lovely actions
he was willing to make his men and women perform. When he had written a
passage that pleased him very much he could not resist clapping on his
hat and rushing forth to find an acquaintance to whom he might instantly
read his successful composition. Gilbert Wakefield, universally
acknowledged to have been the best Greek scholar of his time, said he
would have turned out a