ntly does good work
without the slightest exertion. In composition it will often produce
a better effect than if it acted with effort, because the essence of
good composition is that the ideas should be connected by the
easiest possible transitions. When a man has been thinking hard and
long upon a subject, he becomes temporarily familiar with certain
steps of thought, certain short cuts, and certain far-fetched
associations, that do not commend themselves to the minds of other
persons, nor indeed to his own at other times; therefore, it is
better that his transitory familiarity with them should have come to
an end before he begins to write or speak. When he returns to the
work after a sufficient pause he is conscious that his ideas have
settled; that is, they have lost their adventitious relations to one
another, and stand in those in which they are likely to reside
permanently in his own mind, and to exist in the minds of others.

Although the brain is able to do very fair work fluently in an
automatic way, and though it will of its own accord strike out
sudden and happy ideas, it is questionable if it is capable of
working thoroughly and profoundly without past or present effort.
The character of this effort seems to me chiefly to lie in bringing
the contents of the antechamber more nearly within the ken of
consciousness, which then takes comprehensive note of all its
contents, and compels the logical faculty to test them _seriatim_
before selecting the fittest for a summons to the presence-chamber.

Extreme fluency and a vivid and rapid imagination are gifts
naturally and healthfully possessed by those who rise to be great
orators or literary men, for they could not have become successful
in those careers without it. The curious fact already alluded to of
five editors of newspapers being known to me as having phantasmagoria,
points to a connection between two forms of fluency, the literary
and the visual. Fluency may be also a morbid faculty, being markedly
increased by alcohol (as poets are never tired of telling us), and
by various drugs; and it exists in delirium, insanity, and states of
high emotions. The fluency of a vulgar scold is extraordinary.

In preparing to write or speak upon a subject of which the details
have been mastered, I gather, after some inquiry, that the usual
method among persons who have the gift of fluency is to think
cursorily on topics connected with it, until what I have called the
a