, "is a dictionary of faded metaphors"; and every writer who
creates a new image, or even reproduces an old one by passing it through
a fresh mind, enlarges this vast treasure-house. And this applies not
only to words of beauty, but to words of wit. "All wit," said Mr. Pitt,
"is true reasoning "; and Rogers, who preserved this saying, added, that
he himself had lived long before making the discovery that wit was
truth.

A final condition of literary art is _thoroughness_, which must be shown
both in the preparation and in the revision of one's work. The most
brilliant mind yet needs a large accumulated capital of facts and
images, before it can safely enter on its business, Coleridge went to
Davy's chemical lectures, he said, to get a new stock of metaphors.
Addison, before beginning the Spectator, had accumulated three folio
volumes of notes. "The greater part of an author's time," said Dr.
Johnson, "is spent in reading in order to write; a man will turn over
half a library to make one book." Unhappily, with these riches comes the
chance of being crushed by them, of which the agreeable Roman Catholic
writer, Digby, is a striking recent example. There is no satisfaction in
being told, as Charles Lamb told Godwin, that "you have read more books
that are not worth reading than any other man"; nor in being described,
as was Southey by Shelley, as "a talking album, filled with long
extracts from forgotten books on unimportant subjects." One must not
have more knowledge than one can keep in subjection; but every literary
man needs to accumulate a whole tool-chest in his memory, and another
in his study, before he can be more than a journeyman at his trade.

Yet the labor of preparation is not, after all, more important than that
of final revision. The feature of literary art which is always least
appreciated by the public, and even by young authors, is the amount of
toil it costs. But all the standards, all the precedents of every art,
show that the greatest gifts do not supersede the necessity of work. The
most astonishing development of native genius in any direction, so far
as I know, is that of Mozart in music; yet it is he who has left the
remark, that, if few equalled him in his vocation, few had studied it
with such persevering labor and such unremitting zeal. There is still
preserved at Ferrara the piece of paper on which Ariosto wrote in
sixteen different ways one of his most famous stanzas. The novel which
Hawthor