ts of letters and notes, of covers
of periodicals and shreds of curling papers, unctuous with pomatum and
bear's grease.

Mrs. Lizzie W. Champney writes absolutely without method. Her stories,
she admits, have been penned in her nursery, with her baby in her lap,
and a sturdy little boy standing on the rails of her chair and
strangling her with his loving little arms. She works whenever and
wherever she can find the opportunity; but the children are always put
first.

George Ticknor, the Bostonian, found William Hazlitt living in the very
house in which Milton dictated "Paradise Lost," and occupying the room
where the poet kept the organ on which he loved to play. It was an
enormous room, but furnished only with a table, three chairs, and an old
picture. The most interesting thing that the visitor from Boston saw,
except the occupant himself, was the white-washed walls. Hazlitt had
used them as a commonplace book, writing on them in pencil scraps of
brilliant thoughts, half-lines of poetry, and references. Hazlitt
usually wrote with the breakfast things on the table, and there they
remained until he went out, at four or five o'clock, to dinner. His pen
was more to him than a mechanical instrument; it was also the
intellectual wand by which he called up thoughts and opinions, and
clothed them in appropriate language.

It was in a bookseller's back-shop, M. Nisard tells us, on a desk to
which was fastened a great Newfoundland dog (who, by-the-bye, one day
banged through the window of an upper room, desk and all, to join his
master in the street below), that Armand Carrel, one moment absorbed in
English memoirs and papers, another moment in caressing his four-footed
friend, conceived and wrote his "History of the Counter Revolution in
England." Mr. Walker, in this as in other respects "The Original,"
adopted a mode of composition which, says he, "I apprehend to be very
different from what could be supposed, and from the usual mode. I write
in a bedroom at a hotel, sitting upon a cane chair, in the same dress I
go out in, and with no books to refer to but the New Testament,
Shakespeare, and a pocket dictionary." Now and then, when much pressed
for time, and without premeditation, and with his eye on the clock, he
wrote some of his shorter essays at the Athenaeum Club, at the same table
where other members were writing notes and letters.

VI.

Aids to Inspiration.

Washington Irving's literary work was genera