in than to undertake to
write another book."

Thackeray confessed that the title for his novel, "Vanity Fair," came to
him in the middle of the night, and that he jumped out of bed and ran
three times around the room, shouting the words. Thackeray had no
literary system. He wrote only when he felt like it. Sometimes he was
unable to write two lines in succession. Then, again, he could sit down
and write so rapidly that he would keep three sheets in the wind all the
time. While he was editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_ he never succeeded
in getting copy enough ahead for more than five issues. In this
negligence he fell far behind the magazine editors of the present time.
They always have bundles of copy on hand.

II.

Care in Literary Production.

Indolence, that is to say, chronic fatigue, appears to be the natural
habit of imaginative brains. It is a commonplace to note that men of
fertile fancy, as a class, have been notorious for their horror of
formulating their ideas even by the toil of thought, much more by
passing them through the crucible of the ink-bottle. In many cases they
have needed the very active stimulant of hunger. The _cacoethes
scribendi_ is a disease common, not to imaginative, but to imitative,
minds. Probably no hewer of wood or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of
the toil of those whose work is reputed play, but is, in fact, a battle,
every moment, between the flesh and the spirit. Campbell, who at the age
of sixty-one could drudge at an unimaginative work for fourteen hours a
day like a galley-slave, "and yet," as he says in one of his letters,
"be as cheerful as a child," speaks in a much less happy tone of the
work which alone was congenial to him: "The truth is, I am not writing
poetry, but projecting it, and that keeps me more idle and abstracted
than you can conceive. I pass hours thinking about what I am to compose.
The actual time employed in composition is but a fraction of the time
lost in setting about it." "At Glasgow," we read of him even when a
young man, "he seldom exercised his gift except when roused into action
either by the prospect of gaining a prize or by some striking incident."
Campbell, if not a great man, was a typical worker.

A playwright, who had written five hundred lines in three days, taunted
Euripides because he had spent as much time upon five lines. "Yes,"
replied the poet, "but your five hundred lines in three days will be
forgotten, while my five w