“MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND,—­Your letter from Penryth [sic] without date, but bearing the ominous post-mark, ‘April 1st,’ has completely made a fool of me, in that sense which implies that nothing else can excuse a grey head and a seared heart for thinking and feeling that there are such things in the world as affection and sincerity.  Being fond of flying in the face of reason, and despising experience, whenever they lay down general rules, I am resolved to believe in exceptions, to delight in instances, and to be quite satisfied that I have ’troops of friends’—­you being one of the troopers—­no matter how few others there may be, or where they are to be found.

“You really must imagine how glad we were to see your handwriting again, and I may say also, how surprised; for it passeth our understanding to discover how you make time for any correspondence at all.  We have followed all your literary doings step by step since we left Europe, and we never cease wondering at your fertility and rejoicing at your success.  But I am grieved to think that all this is at the cost of your comfort.  Or is it that you wrote in a querulous mood, when you said those sharp things about your grey goose quill.  Surely composition must be pleasant to you.  No one who writes so fast and so well can find it actually irksome.  I am aware that people sometimes think they find it so.  But we may deceive ourselves on the dark as well as on the bright side of our road, and more easily, because it is the dark.  That is to say, we may not only cheat ourselves with false hopes of good, but with false notions of evil, which proves, if it proves anything just now, that you are considerably mistaken when you fancy writing to be a bore, and that I know infinitely better than you do what you like or dislike.”

It is rather singular to find a literary workman talking in this style.  Grattan was not a fertile writer, and, I must suppose, was never a very industrious one.  But he surely must have known that talk about the pleasures of “composition” was wholly beside the mark. That may be, often is, pleasant enough, and if the thoughts could be telephoned from the brain to the types it would all be mighty agreeable; and the world would be very considerably more overwhelmed with authorship than it is.  It is the “grey goose quill” work, the necessity for incarnating the creatures of the brain in black and white, that is the world’s protection from this avalanche.  And I for one do not understand how anybody who, eschewing the sunshine and the fields and the song of birds, or the enjoyment of other people’s brain-work, has glued himself to his desk for long hours, can say or imagine that his task is, or has been, aught else than hard and distasteful work, demanding unrelaxing self-denial and industry.  And however fine the frenzy in which the poet’s eye may roll while he builds the lofty line, the work of putting some thousands of them on the paper when built must be as irksome to him as the penny-a-liner’s task is to him—­more so, in that the mind of the latter does not need to be forcibly and painfully restrained from rushing on to the new pastures which invite it, and curbed to the pack-horse pace of the quill-driving process.