cept for the necessity of paying the costs of his mother's
funeral. He was an extremely indolent man, and yet he was a laborious
worker where the imagination was not concerned. After spending the
evening at the literary club in the society of Burke, Goldsmith, and
other friends, he returned home between midnight and sunrise, went to
bed, and was seldom seen before noon. Bennet Langton was so delighted
with the _Rambler_, that he went to London to be introduced to Johnson.
He called upon him about twelve o'clock, but the great doctor was not
yet visible. After waiting some time, the author of the _Rambler_ made
his appearance. The visitor expected to see a neatly dressed
philosopher, but, instead, a huge, uncouth figure rolled into the room
in a soiled morning-gown, with an ill-arranged wig, and stockings
falling over his shoes.

The elder Dumas, in order to get any work done at all, had to forbid
himself, by an effort of will, to leave his desk before a certain number
of pages were written. Victor Hugo is said to have locked up his clothes
while writing "Notre-Dame," so that he might not escape from it till the
last word was written. In such cases the so-called "pleasures of
imagination" look singularly like the pains of stone-breaking. The
hardest part of the lot of genius, we suspect, has been not the
emotional troubles popularly--and with absurd exaggeration--ascribed to
it, but a disgust for labor during the activity of the fancy, and the
necessity for labor when it is most disgusting.

Victor Hugo composed with wonderful rapidity. He wrote his "Cromwell" in
three months, and his "Notre Dame de Paris" in four months and a half.
But even these have been his longest periods of labor, and as he grew
older he wrote faster. "Marion Delorme" was finished in twenty-four
days, "Hernani" in twenty-six, and "Le Roi s'amuse" in twenty. Although
the poet wrote very quickly, he often corrected laboriously. He rarely
rewrote. Mme. Drouet, who was his literary secretary for thirty years,
copied all his manuscripts. Otherwise the printers would have found him
one of the most difficult authors to put into type. Mme. Drouet saved
them much worry, and himself or his publishers much expense in the way
of composition. She also assisted in the correction of the proofs. He
generally had several works in the stocks at the same time. Hugo
considered a change of subject a recreation. He would go from poetry to
fiction, from fiction to histo