n to my later plays,[6] 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,[7] 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 someone 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,[8]
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[9] is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all
men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds
directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to
have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that great
writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here
that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences
he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible;
before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should
long have practised the literary scales;[10] and it is only after
years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding
for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within
the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very
true saying that failure i