er than the type in which they
shall be set, it is unrolled along the little blue slips of paper. A
crust of bread and glass of wine are brought in, but no word is spoken.
The work goes rapidly forward, and halts at last suddenly. The pen is
dashed aside, a few letters, seldom more than three lines in each, are
written and despatched to the post, and then again into the garden,
visits to the horse, cow, and fowls, then another long turn around the
lawn, and at last a seat with a quaint old volume in the tent under the
mulberry-tree. Friends come,--walks and conversation. A very simple
dinner at four. Then a short nap--forty winks--upon the great sofa in
the study; another long stroll over the lawn while tea is prepared. Over
the tea-table are jokes of all kinds, as at dinner. In the later years
of his life, Jerrold seldom wrote after dinner; and his evenings were
usually spent alone in his study, reading, writing letters, &c.
Sometimes he would join the family circle for half an hour before going
to bed at ten; but his rule was a solitary evening in the study with his
books.

Dickens's favorite time for composition is said to be in the morning.
Powell, in his "Notices of Living Authors of England," says that he
writes till about one or two o'clock, when he lunches, and afterwards
takes a walk for a couple of hours; returns to dinner, and gives the
evening to his own or a friend's fireside. Sometimes his method of labor
is much more intense and unremitting. Of his delightful little Christmas
book, "The Chimes," the author says, in a letter to a friend, that he
shut himself up for one month close and tight over it. "All my
affections and passions got twined and knotted up in it, and I became as
haggard as a murderer long before I wrote, 'The End.' When I had done
that, like 'The Man of Thessaly,' who, having scratched his eyes out in
a quickset hedge, plunged into a bramble-bush to scratch them in again,
I fled to Venice to recover the composure I had disturbed." When his
imagination begins to outline a new novel, with vague thoughts rife
within him, he goes "wandering about at night into the strangest
places," he says, "seeking rest and finding none."

Bulwer accomplishes his voluminous productions in about three hours a
day, usually from ten until one, and seldom later, writing all with his
own hand. Composition was at first very laborious to him, but he gave
himself sedulously to mastering its difficulties; and is sai