years reached such an enormous number that, when he attempted to form a catalogue of them, he was compelled to give up the task in despair; he was constantly adding to the enormous reservoir of knowledge which he had at command, and thus his work never grew stale, and he was ready instantly with a hundred illustrative lights on any point which chanced to crop up either in conversation or in the course of his reading.  The cheap and flashy writer is inclined to disdain the men who are thorough in their studies; but, while his work grows thin and poor, the judicious reader’s becomes marked by more and more of richness and fulness.

Burke kept his vast accumulations of knowledge perfectly fresh; and I notice in him that, instead of growing more staid and commonplace in his style as he increased in years, he grew more vigorous, until he actually slid into the excess of gaudy redundancy.  I am sorry that his prose ever became Asiatic in its splendour; but even that fact shows how steadfast effort may prevent a man from writing away his originality and his freshness of manner.  Observe the sad results of an antagonistic proceeding for even the mightiest of brains.  Sir Walter Scott was building up his brain until he was forty years old; then we had the Homeric strength of “Marmion,” the perfect art of the “Antiquary,” the unequalled romantic interest of “Guy Mannering,” “Rob Roy,” “Ivanhoe,” “Quentin Durward.”  The long years of steady production drained that most noble flood of knowledge and skill until we reached the obvious fatuity of “Count Robert” and the imbecilities of “Castle Dangerous.”  Any half-dozen of such books as “Redgauntlet,” “The Pirate,” and “Kenilworth” were sufficient to give a man the reputation of being great—­and yet even that overwhelming opulence was at last worn down into mental poverty.  Poor Scott never gave himself time to recover when once his descent of the last perilous slope had begun, and he suffered for his folly in not resting.

In Lord Tennyson’s case we see how wisdom may preserve a man’s power.  The poet who gave us “Ulysses” so long ago, the poet who brought forth such a magnificent work as “Maud,” retained his power so fully that thirty years after “Maud” he gave us “Rizpah.”  This continued freshness, lasting nearly threescore years, is simply due to economy of physical and mental resource, which is far more important than any economy of money.  Charles Dickens cannot be said to have been fairly written out at any time; but he was often perilously near that condition; only his power of throwing himself with eagerness into any scheme of relaxation saved him; and, but for the readings and the unhappy Sittingbourne railway accident, he might be with us now full of years and honours.  When he did suffer himself to be worked to a low ebb for a time, his writing was very bad.  Even in the flush of his youth, when he was persuaded to write “Oliver Twist” in a hurry, he fell far below his own standard.  I have lately read the