and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger
belief.

The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated,
line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times.
The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which
have stood the test of time is almost incredible. Lucretius worked
nearly a lifetime on one poem. It completely absorbed his life. It is
said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then
was not satisfied with it. John Foster would sometimes linger a week
over a single sentence. He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the
roots, or practise any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it
gained his consent to exist. Chalmers was once asked what Foster was
about in London. "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a
week."

Even Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, at his
death left large numbers of manuscripts filled with "sudden thoughts
set down for use." Hume toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of
England." Lord Eldon astonished the world with his great legal
learning, but when he was a student too poor to buy books, he had
actually borrowed and copied many hundreds of pages of large law books.
Matthew Hale for years studied law sixteen hours a day. Speaking of
Fox, some one declared that he wrote "drop by drop." Rousseau says of
the labor involved in his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts,
blotted, scratched, interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the
trouble they cost me. There is not one of them which I have not been
obliged to transcribe four or five times before it went to press. . . .
Some of my periods I have turned or returned in my head for five or six
nights before they were fit to be put to paper."

Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his painstaking
fidelity and persistent application. There is scarcely a bar in his
music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen times. His
favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which can say to
aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'" Gibbon wrote
his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every morning,
summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste their
evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years. Even
Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived