essay, a history, a novel, or a poem is conceived, grows up, and is corrected for publication.  One would like very much to be informed how Shakespeare put together the scenes of Hamlet or Macbeth, whether the subtile thought accumulated easily on the page before him, or whether he struggled for it with anxiety and distrust.  We know that Milton troubled himself about little matters of punctuation, and obliged the printer to take special note of his requirements, scolding him roundly when he neglected his instructions.  We also know that Melanchthon was in his library hard at work by two or three o’clock in the morning both in summer and winter, and that Sir William Jones began his studies with the dawn.

The most popular female writer of America, whose great novel struck a chord of universal sympathy throughout the civilized world, has habits of composition peculiarly her own, and unlike those belonging to any author of whom we have record.  She croons, so to speak, over her writings, and it makes very little difference to her whether there is a crowd of people about her or whether she is alone during the composition of her books.  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was wholly prepared for the press in a little wooden house in Maine, from week to week, while the story was coming out in a Washington newspaper.  Most of it was written by the evening lamp, on a pine table, about which the children of the family were gathered together conning their various lessons for the next day.  Amid the busy hum of earnest voices, constantly asking questions of the mother, intent on her world-renowned task, Mrs. Stowe wove together those thrilling chapters which were destined to find readers in so many languages throughout the globe.  No work of similar importance, so far as we know, was ever written amid so much that seemed hostile to literary composition.

I had the opportunity, both in England and America, of observing the literary habits of Thackeray, and it always seemed to me that he did his work with comparative ease, but was somewhat influenced by a custom of procrastination.  Nearly all his stories were written in monthly instalments for magazines, with the press at his heels.  He told me that when he began a novel he rarely knew how many people were to figure in it, and, to use his own words, he was always very shaky about their moral conduct.  He said that sometimes, especially if he had been dining late and did not feel in remarkably good-humor next morning, he was inclined to make his characters villanously wicked; but if he rose serene with an unclouded brain, there was no end to the lovely actions he was willing to make his men and women perform.  When he had written a passage that pleased him very much he could not resist clapping on his hat and rushing forth to find an acquaintance to whom he might instantly read his successful composition.  Gilbert Wakefield, universally acknowledged to have been the best Greek scholar of his time, said he would have turned out a much better one, if he had begun earlier to study that language; but unfortunately he did not begin till he was fifteen years of age.  Thackeray, in quoting to me this saying of Wakefield, remarked:  “My English would have been very much better if I had read Fielding before I was ten.”  This observation was a valuable hint, on the part of Thackeray, as to whom he considered his master in art.