When Montesquieu was deeply engaged in his great work, he writes to a friend:—­“The favour which your friend Mr. Hein, often does me to pass his mornings with me, occasions great damage to my work as well by his impure French as the length of his details.”—­“We are afraid,” said some of those visitors to BAXTER, “that we break in upon your time.”—­“To be sure you do,” replied the disturbed and blunt scholar.  To hint as gently as he could to his friends that he was avaricious of time, one of the learned Italians had a prominent inscription over the door of his study, intimating that whoever remained there must join in his labours.  The amiable MELANCTHON, incapable of a harsh expression, when he received these idle visits, only noted down the time he had expended, that he might reanimate his industry, and not lose a day.  EVELYN, continually importuned by morning visitors, or “taken up by other impertinencies of my life in the country,” stole his hours from his night rest “to redeem his losses.”  The literary character has been driven to the most inventive shifts to escape the irruption of a formidable party at a single rush, who enter, without “besieging or beseeching,” as Milton has it.  The late Mr. Ellis, a man of elegant tastes and poetical temperament, on one of these occasions, at his country-house, assured a literary friend, that when driven to the last, he usually made his escape by a leap out of the window; and Boileau has noticed a similar dilemma when at the villa of the President Lamoignon, while they were holding their delightful conversations in his grounds.

  Quelquefois de facheux arrivent trois volees,
  Que du parc a l’instant assiegent les allees;
  Alors sauve qui peut, et quatre fois heureux
  Qui sait s’echapper, a quelque autre ignore d’eux.

BRAND HOLLIS endeavoured to hold out “the idea of singularity as a shield;” and the great ROBERT BOYLE was compelled to advertise in a newspaper that he must decline visits on certain days, that he might have leisure to finish some of his works.[A]

[Footnote A:  This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch’s “Life of Boyle,” p. 272.  Boyle’s labours were so exhausting to his naturally weak frame, and so continuous from his eager desire for investigation, that this advertisement was concocted by the advice of his physician, “to desire to be excused from receiving visits (unless upon occasions very extraordinary) two days in the week, namely, on the forenoon of Tuesdays and Fridays (both foreign post days), and on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the afternoons, that he may have some time, both to recruit his spirits, to range his papers, and fill up the lacunae of them, and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered and have their face often changed by the public calamities there.”  He ordered likewise a board to be placed over his door, with an inscription signifying when he did, and when he did not receive visits.—­ED.]