wed his children (like their mute
playmates, Camp and the greyhounds) free access to his study, never
considered their talk as any disturbance, let them come and go as
pleased their fancy, was always ready to answer their questions, and
when they, unconscious how he was engaged (writes the husband of one of
them), entreated him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, he would
take them on his knee, repeat a ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set
them down again to their marbles or ninepins, and resume his labor as if
refreshed by the interruption. There was nothing in that manly, sound,
robust constitution akin to the morbid irritability of Philip in the
poem:--

"When Philip wrote, he never seemed so well--
Was startled even if a cinder fell,
And quickly worried."

Biographers of Mistress Aphra Behn make it noteworthy of that too facile
penwoman that she could write away in company and maintain the while
her share in the talk. Madame Roland managed to get through her memoirs
with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, though so often
interrupted in the composition of them by the cries of victims in the
adjoining cells, whom the executioners were dragging thence to the
guillotine.

Madame de Stael, "even in her most inspired compositions," according to
Madame Necker de Saussure, "had pleasure in being interrupted by those
she loved." She was not, observed Lord Lytton, of the tribe of those who
labor to be inspired; who darken the room and lock the door, and entreat
you not to disturb them. Rather, she came of the same stock as George
Sand's Olympe, who "se mit a ecrire sur un coin de la table, entre le
bouteille de biere et le sucrier, au bruit des verres et de la
conversation aussi tranquillement que si elle eut ete dans la solitude.
Cette puissance de concentration etait une de ses facultes les plus
remarquables."

That Lord Castlereagh was able to write his despatches at the common
table in the common room of a country house is not unjustly among the
admiring reminiscences of a Septuagenarian (Countess Brownlow): "Once
only we found the talking and laughter were too much for his power of
abstraction, and then he went off into his own room, saying next morning
at breakfast, 'You fairly beat me last night; I was writing what I may
call the metaphysics of politics.'"

Celebrated in the "Noctes Ambrosianae" is the Glasgow poet, Sandy Rogers,
not less for his lyrics, one at least of which is pr