THE LABORS OF AUTHORSHIP.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 192, 20 January 1875, Page 3

THE LABORS OF AUTHORSHIP.

The poet Young gives the following good advice to authors : “ Write and rewrite, blot and write again, And for, its swiftness ne’er applaud your pen ; Leave to the jockeys that Newmarket praise— Slow runs the Pegasus that wins the bays. Much time for immortality to pay Is just and wise ; for less is thrown away. Time only can mature the lab’ring brain, Time is the father, and the midwife pain ; The same good sense that makes a man excel Still makes him doubt he ne’er has written well ; Downright impossibilities they seek : What man can be immortal in a weehV ’ “ And yet,” Sir John Hawkins says, “the original manuscripts of the ‘ Rambler,’ by Dr. Johnson, have passed through my hands, and by the perusal of them I am warranted to say, as was said of Shakespeare by the players of his time, that he never blotted a line.” Scott was a very rapid writer. We have his own testimony that the second and third volumes of “ Waverly ” were written in three weeks, and Mr Lockhart states that twice the time sufficed to produce the whole of “Guy Mannering.” Byron was also a rapid composer. He wrote his “ Bride of Abydos ” in a single night, and, it is said, without mending his pen. The pen is preserved in the British Museum. Of writers who were remarkable for their elaboration of a line, the following instances might be adduced:—lsocrates spent tensor, as some will have it, fifteen years in polishing one panegyric. Dion Cassius employed twelve years in writing his history, and ten years in preparing his memoirs. Virgil employed seven years to finish his Bucolics; and after a labor of eleven years pronounced his “ AEneid ” imperfect. Jacobus Samnazarius wrote three books, “De Partie Virginia,” and dedicated twenty years to this labor. Diodorus Siculus was thirty years in composing his history. The manuscripts of Ariosto are full of erasures. This may be seen in the autograph manuscript preserved, at Florence; the celebrated stanza in which he described a tempest is written in sixteen different ways. Petrarch remade one of his verses forty-six times. The manuscripts of Tasso are illegible in consequence of all their corrections. St Pierre copied his “ Paul and Virginia” nine times in order to render it more perfect. Balzac, the' first writer in French prose who gave majesty and harmony to a period, it is said, did not grudge to bestow a week on a page, and was never satisfied with his first thoughts. It cost Lord Lyttelton twenty years to write the “ Life and History of Henry II,” and the historian Gibbon was twelve years in completing his “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” Goldsmith considered four lines a day good work. He was seven years in locating out the pure gold of his “Deserted Village.” Pope was so fastidious that he published nothing until it had been a year or two before him. The remark was once made to Moore the poet, that it was supposed his verses slipped off his tongue as if by magic, and a passage of great ease was quoted. “ Why, sir,” said Moore, “that line cost me hours, days, and weeks of attrition before it would come!”