of
the surest marks of the highest intellect, and which Alison so much
admired in Wellington--as, for instance, on the day when he lay at San
Christoval, in front of the French army, hourly expecting a battle, and
wrote out, in the field, a long and minute memorial on the establishment
of a bank at Lisbon on the principles of the English ones.

We read of Ercilla, whose epic poem, the _Arancana_, has admirers out of
Spain, that he wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers of a
campaign against barbarians, without shelter, and with nothing to write
on but small scraps of waste paper, and often only leather; struggling
at once against enemies and surrounding circumstances.

Louis de Cormantaigne, the distinguished French engineer, composed his
treatise on fortification from notes written in the trenches and on the
breaches, even under the fire of the enemy.

Delambre was in Paris when it was taken by the allies in 1814, and is
said to have worked at his problems with perfect tranquility from eight
in the morning till midnight, in the continued hearing of the cannonade.
"Such self-possession for study under that tremendous attack, and such
absence of interest in the result of the great struggle, to say nothing
of indifference to personal danger," is what one of his biographers
confesses himself unable to understand. Small sympathy would the
philosopher have had with the temperament of such a man, say, as Thomas
Hood, who always wrote most at night, when all was quiet and the
children were asleep. "I have a room to myself," exclaims Hood,
triumphantly, in a letter describing a change of lodgings, "which will
be worth L20 a year to me,--for a little disconcerts my nerves." Mrs.
Hood brought up the children, we learn from one of them, in a sort of
Spartan style of education, on her husband's account, teaching them the
virtues of silence and low voices.

Washington Irving was of a less morbid temperament, and his genial
nature could put up with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor
small; but even in his Diary we meet with such entries as this at
Bordeaux, in 1825: "Harassed by noises in the house, till I had to go
out in despair, and write in Mr. Guestier's library." It was upon the
Essay on American Scenery that he was then engaged.

Unlike Maturin, who used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead,
which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they
must not speak to him, Scott allo