he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down
into a full appreciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft of a
whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs,
revises, and re-revises. Goethe acted as if while art is long, life were
long also. Till the contrary is proved, we must consistently hold that
Goethe was the philosopher before dinner-time, and the poet in the
theatre, or during those long after-dinner hours over his two or three
bottles of wine. That these later hours were often spent socially proves
nothing, one way or the other. Some men need such active influences as
their form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found, or made, his ideas while
listening to music or galloping on horseback. Instances are common in
every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a
room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about
the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the
seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose
conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity: "I lately
found one of the most learned men in France studying in the corner of a
room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. He
told me--and Seneca says much the same himself--that he worked all the
better for this uproar, as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to
withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the
storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. When at Padua he had lodged
so long over the clattering of the traffic and the tumult of the
streets, that he had been trained not only to be indifferent to noise,
but even to require it for the prosecution of his studies."

Goethe abominated smoking, though he was a German. Bayard Taylor says
that he tolerated the use of the pipe by Schiller and his sovereign,
Carl August, but otherwise he was very severe in denouncing it. Goethe
himself somewhere says that "with tobacco, garlic, bed-bugs, and
hypocrites he should wage perpetual war."

We learn from Mr. Forster that "method in everything was Dickens'
peculiarity, and between breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions,
was his time of work. But his daily walks were less of rule than of
enjoyment and necessity. In the midst of his writing they were
indispensable, and especially, as it has been shown, at night." When he
had work on hand he walked all over the town furiously,