had laid one down, he never could stick
to it. "I tried only to make that which I was writing diverting and
interesting, leaving the rest to fate. This habnab at a venture is a
perilous style, I grant, but I cannot help it."

VIII.

Burning Midnight Oil.

That night, and not morning, is most appropriate to imaginative work is
supported by a general consent among those who have followed instinct in
this matter. Upon this question, which can scarcely be called vexed,
Charles Lamb is the classical authority: "No true poem ever owed its
birth to the sun's light. The mild, internal light, that reveals the
fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in
the sunshine. Milton's 'Morning Hymn in Paradise,' we would hold a good
wager, was penned at midnight, and Taylor's rich description of a
sunrise smells decidedly of a taper." "This view of evening and
candle-light," to quote his commentator, De Quincey, once more, "as
involved in the full delight of literature," may seem no more than a
pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties
to travel a little into exaggeration; but substantially it is certain
that Lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually in the direction here
indicated. His literary studies, whether taking the color of tasks or
diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by means of physical
weariness, produces a more luxurious state of repose than belongs to
the labor hours of day; they courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as
Lord Bacon remarked, "gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures,
such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light." Those
words, "physical weariness," if they do not contain the whole philosophy
of the matter, are very near it, and are, at all events, more to the
point than the quotation from Lord Bacon. They almost exactly define
that unnatural condition of the body which, on other grounds, appears to
be proper to the unnatural exercise of the mind. It will be remembered
that Balzac recommended the night for the artist's work, the day for the
author's drudgery. Southey, who knew as well as anybody who ever put pen
to paper how to work, and how to get the best and the most out of
himself, and who pursued the same daily routine through his whole
literary life, performed his tasks in the following order: From
breakfast till dinner, history, transcription for the press, and, in
general, all the work that Scott