many erasures as
those of Ariosto or Petrarch; they show his eagerness to dash down his
first thoughts, and the art by which he raised them to the impassioned
style of his imagination. The memoir of GIBBON was composed seven or nine
times, and, after all, was left unfinished; and BUFFON tells us that he
wrote his "Epoques de la Nature" eighteen times before it satisfied his
taste. BURNS'S anxiety in finishing his poems was great; "all my poetry,"
said he, "is the effect of easy composition, but of laborious correction."

POPE, when employed on the _Iliad_, found it not only occupy his thoughts
by day, but haunting his dreams by night, and once wished himself hanged,
to get rid of Homer: and that he experienced often such literary agonies,
witness his description of the depressions and elevations of genius:

Who pants for glory, finds but short repose;
A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows!

When ROMNEY undertook to commence the first subject for the Shakspeare
Gallery, in the rapture of enthusiasm, amidst the sublime and pathetic
labouring in his whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The subject
chosen was "The Tempest;" and, as Hayley truly observes, it created many a
tempest in the fluctuating spirits of Romney. The vehement desire of that
perfection which genius conceives, and cannot always execute, held a
perpetual contest with that dejection of spirits which degrades the
unhappy sufferer, and casts him, grovelling among the mean of his class.
In a national work, a man of genius pledges his honour to the world for
its performance; but to redeem that pledge, there is a darkness in the
uncertain issue, and he is risking his honour for ever. By that work he
will always be judged, for public failures are never forgotten, and it is
not then a party, but the public itself, who become his adversaries. With
ROMNEY it was "a fever of the mad;" and his friends could scarcely inspire
him with sufficient courage to proceed with his arduous picture, which
exercised his imagination and his pencil for several years. I have heard
that he built a painting-room purposely for this picture; and never did an
anchorite pour fourth a more fervent orison to Heaven, than Romney when
this labour was complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary
feelings, but he was uneducated, and incompetent even to write a letter;
yet on this occasion, relieved from his intense anxiety under so long a
work, he wrote one of the most e