nothing to distract one's attention. Lytton's richly furnished room, with its pictures and laden book-shelvespotent inspirers to the literary man as he looks about for an idea or an expression-was isolated from the rest of the house, so that the least noise, which would have irritated him in the extreme, might be intercepted. Undoubtedly the most perfect atmosphere for a literary worker is that of a quiet study, with drawn curtains, a bright lamp, and a cheerful fire, in the long winter evenings.

How Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb worked together in the writing of the "Tales of Shakespeare" is thus described by Mary in a letter to a friend: "You would like to see us as we often sit writing at the same table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'; rather like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it." Lamb, despite the apparent spontaneity of his writings, found at times composition intolerably slow, and the labor of producing it exhausting. He complained in a letter to Bernard Barton in 1824 that he had been for weeks "insuperably dull and lethargic"; and calls his attention to what he describes as "a futile effort" in the "London Magazine" "wrung from me," he groans, "with slow pain." This is the charming essay entitled "Blakesmoor," which to the reader has nothing forced, and possesses all the ease, grace, distinction, and inevitableness of the genial essayist.

To Lamb a walk through crowded and bustling Fleet Street proved a stimulus to his jaded faculties. Barry Cornwall also found not distraction but inspiration in the roar of London. The poet composed best when alone in a crowd, and on a line or a couplet strik

ing him he would go into a hallway and jot it down. Dickens suffered from sluggishness of mind out of London. In a letter to John Forster from Lausanne, in 1846, while engaged on "Dombey and Son," he complains that he was not getting on rapidly with the novel. "I suppose," he adds, "this is partly the effect of two years' ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labor of writing day after day without that magic lantern is immense!! I don't say this at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were at Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before, My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only the 'Chimes'), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there-but Lord! I had two miles of streets, at least, lighted at night, to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to every night."

If some writers can successfully wrestle with the throes of composition in any place, at any hour, or at any season, most writers undoubtedly are influenced by their surroundings, and their varying idiosyncrasies in this respect afford a curious study. To some the moments of rarest intellectual exaltation come when they are in the country, in the spring or summer months, amid brilliant sunshine, and glowing flowers, and singing birds, and leafy trees, and emerald fields. Other writers find the rigid concentration, the

intense thinking essential to composition, impossible amid rural sights and sounds. The singing of a bird, the sunshine gleaming on the meadows, the tapping of a leaf on the window pane, the buzzing of a bee, the vivid coloring of a passing butterfly's wing, have a disturbing and distracting influence— the irresistible voices of nature rendering composition an intolerable laborand it is only in London, amid the rumble and roar of the crowded traffic, the whirl and jingle of the hansom, the blatancy of the piano-organ, the ceaseless clatter of the 'buses, that they find the repose, the restfulness, and the stimulus for literary work. "One thing about London impresses me," says Lowell in an eloquent passage, "beyond any other sound I have ever heard, and that is the low, unceasing roar one hears always in the air; it is not a mere accident, like a tempest or a cataract, but it is impressive, because it always indicates human will, and impulse, and conscious movement. And I confess that when I hear it I almost feel as if I were listening to the roaring loom of time." Standing by the Bank, Heinrich Heine declared he heard the world's pulse beat audibly. Surely most writers whose lot is cast in London must find inspiration in the audible beating of the world's pulse, or the sound in their ears of the roaring loom of time-in the metaphorical roar of London, that is, if not in its literal noise. As Cowper writes:

"Tis pleasant through the loop-holes of retreat

To peep at such a world. To see the stir

Of the Great Babel and not feel the crowd.

To hear the roar she sends through all

her gates

At a safe distance, where the dying sound

Falls a soft murmur on the injured ear.

It is generally agreed that the morn

ing or the afternoon is the best time of the day for literary work. But that again depends a good deal upon mood and habit and temperament. Brinsley Sheridan's best hours of composition were at night, and he required a profusion of lights around him while he wrote. "I work best by candlelight," said Southey. Mrs. Oliphant stated that for many years it was customary with her to write until two o'clock in the morning. "It is past three at this moment, May 19th, 1895," she added in her "Journal," "but this is no longer usual with me." Thackeray said his best work was done before ten o'clock in the morning, at which hour he breakfasted. He usually devoted the rest of his day to his family and friends. But it was in the middle of the night that the title for his most famous novel "Vanity Fair" suddenly occurred to him. "I jumped out of bed," said he, "and ran three times round my room, uttering as I went, 'Vanity Fair!' 'Vanity Fair!' 'Vanity Fair!" The story goes that Mrs. Emerson was sometimes startled at night by her husband rising to write down a "happy thought" which came to his mind. "What is the matter? Are you ill?" she would inquire; and the philosopher's soft voice would answer, "No, my dear, only an idea."

Scott in the first years of his literary career wrote generally at night; but on the advice of his physician whom he consulted for nervous headaches, from which he was suffering, he adopted habits of early rising and early work. He was out of bed by five o'clock all the year round, at his desk by six, and by the time that his family and visitors assembled at breakfast, between nine and ten, he had "broken the neck of the day's work." Dickens, on ordinary working days, would write between breakfast and luncheon and devote the afternoon to the correction of what the morning had seen developed. Bulwer Lytton also worked in

the forenoon. "Nobody considers," he wrote, "how much writing may be done between the hours of ten and one if the mind be steadily fixed on the work. When the mind is at ease, the subject clearly laid down, and the heart of the writer in the work, a volume a month-an amount that might frighten a beginner to think of-is mere relaxation." With a serene mind, and high spirits, and a full knowledge of the subject, composition is, perhaps, easy at any time of the day or night. But often the mind is dullest and the spirits heaviest in the morning hours. Cobwebs of sleepiness still hang about the brain. "The morning is my writing time, and in the morning I have no spirits," said Cowper. "So much the worse for my correspondents. Sleep that refreshes my body seems to cripple me in every other respect. As the evening approaches I grow more alert, and when I am retiring to bed am more fit for mental occupation than at any other time. So it fares with us whom they call nervous."

It is curious, too, to note the little superstitions of writers as to the use of particular pens, paper, and ink being conducive to the flow of thought. One can work only on paper of a certain quality and size. Another finds his mind barren of ideas unless he has his favorite pen in his hand. Dickens wrote on blue paper with blue ink. There is the curious case of Pope, "paper-sparing Pope," as his friend Swift described him. He wrote best on scraps of paper. The original copy of his translation of the "Iliad," which may be seen at the British Museum, is a strange spectacle. It is written almost entirely on the covers of letters, and sometimes between the very lines of the letters themselves. Bacon while in the throes of composition had music played in the room adjoining his study. Some writers before sitting down to work light the lamp of their imagina

tion at the torch of their favorite author. Gray, for instance, always read Spencer as a preliminary to composition. Other writers find the spark to set fire to their intellects more readily in passages from their own pens. "I read my own books hardly at all after once giving them forth," says George Eliot, "dreading to find them other than I wish." But I doubt if that is a very common experience. The average writer finds in some of his own passages the light that lifts the gloom which enshrouds his mind; and like the poet he wonders in his uninspired and commonplace moments at the thought and music which once emanated from his brain:

And when his voice is hushed and dumb,

The flame burnt out, the glory dead, He feels a thrill of wonder come At that which his poor tongue has said;

And thinks of each diviner line"Only the hand that wrote was mine."

An intellect which will work independently of time and place and circumstance, and of the accidents and worries of life, is a priceless possession to professional writers, who at times must ply their pens, whether or not they feel inclined for literary composition. Unhappily it is not given to all. Force of will, the rigid concentration of the mind on the subject in hand, work wonders in the case of the practised writer to whom the spur of necessity is applied. But the most common experience is that the mind has its variable moods. Even the writer with something to say, and feeling impelled to say it, often sits down at his table and finds himself unaccountably baffled at the moment he puts pen to paper. Distinction, freshness, charm, individuality-all are wanting in the sentences which, after much labor, he succeeds in composing. Intelligence, insight,

and knowledge are still his, but for the moment the free and joyous play of his well-equipped mind is wanting. The literary impulse is gone; the literary afflatus is filed. For the moment the nerve centre of the brain seems paralyzed. Some force is needed to set the intellect in motion. Suddenly the imagination is set on fire by some mysterious electric spark-through the agency, it may be, of a cigarette, a The Cornhill Magazine.

cup of coffee, a glass of champagne, or a glowing passage from a favorite poet. The jar and fret of nerve is over. The cloud is lifted from the mind. The feeling of mental exhaustion gives place to a conviction of literary power. Ideas come with a rush. This indeed is the literary mood. This, indeed, is the moment of literary inspiration. And composition, losing its throes, becomes a positive rapture. Michael MacDonagh.

Under the title of "respectable poor," I include all persons who, in the expressive phrase so common among them, "keep a home together."

My friends often say to me: "How terrible it must be to work in the slums." I reply (when I have time), "I do not know exactly what is meant by a slum. I have seen collections of dwellings that seemed to me painfully poor and crowded, but they were homes to the people who lived in them. They even spoke of their 'comforts,' and meant what they said in a literal way."

"Oh!" (in flat and disappointed tones) "I suppose you have never worked in really bad places?"

"I have worked in every district of a large seaport town, in an inland town, in the country, and in what are considered the worst parts of London. I have worked-often after dark and sometimes in the middle of the nightin alleys where I was told that no policeman dared walk alone in broad daylight. But the people who told me that had such obvious enjoyment in the tale that it was probably an ancient legend. Bad and sad things often are. Only the other day I picked up an appeal that came from a well-known and

very worthy charity, but I was not a little scandalized to find it baited with anecdotes which, though I do not doubt their original truth, are literally the same that made my blood run cold twenty years ago."

"But to go into places where there is no religion, where the name of God is never heard!"

"Ah! I have certainly never been there. I remember one small district where, in the course of several months, I only once saw anyone go to church or chapel, and then it was a little ballet girl from Drury Lane, leading a still smaller sister; but I have never entered a lane or an alley, scarcely a single room, where religion was not to be found."

"Then you have only worked among the respectable poor?"

"I have only worked among the poor whom I respected. It is true that I do not know the homeless poor. A district nurse can of course only work where there is some kind of a home. She could not, for longer than it would take to fetch an ambulance, nurse a man lying under an archway or by the roadside."

And then my friends turn away disappointed, but exactly why they might

find it as difficult to explain as I to understand.

To count up the churchgoers and chapelgoers, compare the resulting number with the population, and then, if there should be great disparity, argue that the neighborhood is without religion; or to estimate the proportion of children and young persons in places of public worship and then say, "religion has no hold on them when they get older," is a most serious error. It is a confusion of formal outward signs and inward spiritual graces. Many of the poor rarely attend church, not because they are irreligious, but because they have long since received and absorbed the truths by which they live.

Many,

on the other hand, attend regularly because they have not yet found these truths, and hunger for them. It is acknowledged that there are those in all classes of life who go to church constantly for reasons which have no connection with personal religion. It is too difficult to believe that there are those who attend irregularly, or remain away altogether, not because they are persons of evil courses, or dead to things of the spirit, but because their inward religious life is so strong and so simple that they are independent of any "assembling of yourselves together?" A patient whose life had been one long series of illnesses and troubles said to the clergyman who visited her, "I go to the Fountain Head for strength and guidance. God has always sent it to me in His good time."

To such persons it seems as natural that the young should go to church or chapel, and the middle-aged and old remain at home, as that children should go to school and grown men to the workshop. Often I have seen toilworn men and women smile with indulgent humor at zealous curates and deaconesses-Nonconformist ministers, I must own, are generally quicker to recognize the signs of spiritual experience-pre

Enting to them the crudest forms of elementary truths, and ask, after they had bidden them a courteous farewell, "Do they suppose that my soul is of so little value to my Maker that I should have been left seventy years waiting in darkness for them? Do they think there was no teachers when we was young? Things is changed, but there was always ways o' learning, and there always will be."

We are led too much by words and our own interpretations of them. I once ventured to say to a vicar who knew about as much of his poorer parishioners as the typical military governor of sixty years ago knew of his prisoners, that several of the chapels in the town exercised a strong and wholesome influence in some of the most poverty-stricken districts. "How can that be?" he asked. In all the worst and roughest houses I enter, they tell me, 'we're dissenters,' and I have to clear out before I'm made!" It seemed a revelation to him to learn that Nonconformists are not in the habit of calling themselves Dissenters, but Wesleyans, Baptists, etc., and that the people who had made use of the expression meant, in a few cases, "We are unbelievers," and in most, "We don't want you coming in bere just whenever you choose. If you had any manners you'd know when to come."

In face of all the controversial bitterness aroused by the Elementary Education Act, it is curious to observe that my patients and their friends, almost without exception, are not so much indifferent to the dogmas of religion as unconscious of their existence. Even Roman Catholics have asked for my prayers. On the lips of all who are seriously ill I hear but one name, and notwithstanding the strong influence that one would imagine to be exercised on this point by Salvationists, revival meetings and popular hymns, that name is the First Person of the Trinity.