s than three times: first
in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast
on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas
Browne. So with my other works: "Cain," an epic, was (save the mark!) an
imitation of "Sordello": "Robin Hood," a tale in verse, took an eclectic
middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer, and Morris: in
_Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my
innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first
draft of _The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no less a
man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with
staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of
course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought
to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the
inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of "The Book of
Snobs." So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and
down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were
not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas,
but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
other, originally known as _Semiramis: a Tragedy_, I have observed on
bookstalls under the _alias_ of "Prince Otto." But enough has been said
to show by what arts of impersonation and in what purely ventriloquial
efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have
profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was
never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we
could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival
of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier
and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: "But this is not
the way to be original!" It is not; nor is there any way but to be born
so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this
training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be
none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike
Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have
tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a
prime force in