tions as many as eight or nine times before their publication.
Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs and whole pages of his
book as many as fifty times.

Byron wrote the "Bride of Abydos" in a single night, and the quill pen
with which he performed this marvellous feat is still preserved in the
British Museum.

Dryden wrote "Alexander's Feast" in two days.

"The Merry Wives of Windsor" was composed in a fortnight.

Beckford finished "Vathek" in two days and nights.

Henry Ward Beecher's publishers have favored the world with an account
of his habits in composition. "He wrote," they tell us, "with
inconceivable rapidity, in a large, sprawling hand, lines wide apart,
and words so thinly scattered about that some of the pages remind one of
the famous description of a page of Napoleon's manuscript--a scratch, a
blot, and a splutter." This is, indeed, remarkable, but is far exceeded
by the performance in that line of a famous Chinese novelist, who wrote
with such fearful speed, that, throwing the finished sheets over his
head, they soon accumulated to a pile large enough to darken his
windows, and threaten him with suffocation.

Horace, in one of his satires, makes fun of a contemporary poet, whose
chief claim to distinction was that he could compose two hundred verses
standing on one leg. Horace did not think much of the verses, and, we
suspect with good reason.

There are all conceivable habits of composition, and they range from the
slow elaboration of John Foster to the race-horse speed of our doughty
Southern countryman, Henry A. Wise, whose prodigious gubernatorial
compositions are still remembered by a suffering world. Once, sitting by
James Parton, he observed, tersely, "The best writing distils from the
pen drop by drop." Sheridan once said to a friend who had a fatal
facility with his pen, "Your easy writing makes terribly hard reading."

I would not, for the world, have the young men of the country believe
that in writing speed is all. One should not be ambitious to write or do
anything else any faster than he can do it well. It was Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow who once gave this excellent advice to a young author:
"Always write your best; remember, your best."

Wilkie Collins' book, "Heart and Science," so mercilessly excited him
that he says he continued writing week after week without a day's
interval or rest. "Rest was impossible. I made a desperate effort;
rushed to the sea; went sailing an