d to have
rewritten some of his briefer productions eight or nine times before
publication. He now writes very rapidly, averaging, it is said, twenty
octavo pages a day. He says of himself in a letter to a friend: "I
literatize away the morning, ride at three, go to bathe at five, dine at
six, and get through the evening as I best may, sometimes by correcting
a proof."

Charles Anthon, so well known to the classical students of this
generation, was accustomed, for many years at least, constantly to
retire at ten and rise at four, so that a large part of his day's work
was done by breakfast-time; and it was this untiring industry that
enabled him, despite his incessant labors both in college and in school,
to produce some fifty volumes.

Gibbon always studied with his pen in hand, and for the purpose of his
history he practised laboriously the formation of his style of writing.
The first chapter of his history he rewrote three times, and the second
and third chapters twice, before he was satisfied with them; but after
thus getting under way, the greater part of his manuscript was sent to
the press in the first rough draft, without any intermediate copy being
made. After completing his great history, he congratulated himself upon
having accomplished a long, but temperate labor, without fatiguing
either the mind or the body. "Happily for my eyes," he said, "I have
always closed my studies with the day and commonly with the morning."
When he had accomplished the labors of the morning in the library, he
preferred recreation and social enjoyments rather than any exercise of
mind. He gives the following account of his sensations on accomplishing
his great work. "It was on the day, or rather night, of June 27, 1787,
between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of
the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen,
I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias. I will not dissemble
the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the
establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober
melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an
everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion."

This reminds us of the emotions which Noah Webster describes as
overwhelming him when he reached the close of his dictionary. "When I
finished my copy," says Dr. Webster, "I was sitting at my table in
Cambridge, England, January, 1825. When I