Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1876-02-18
WHAT IT COSTS TO WRITE WE'LL.

| Excellence is not matured in day, and
the cost of it is an old story. The begin.
ming of Plato's Republic, !" it is said, was
found in his tablets written over and over
| in variety Of ways. Addison, we are
told, wore out the patience of his printer;
frequently, when nearly whole impress
sion of a "Specta tor" was worked off, he
would stop the press to insert new pre-.
| position. Lambs most sportiye essays
were the results of most intense brain la.
Dor; he used to spend a week at time in
celebrating single humorous letter to a
friend. Tennyson is reported to have
written ''Come Into the Garden, Maud y
more than fifty times over before it pleased
him; and "Locksley Hall, the first draught
of which was written in two days, he spent
the better part of six weeks, for eight
hours a day, in altering and polishing.
Dickens, when he intended to write a
Christmas story, shut himself up for six
weeks, lived the life of hermit, and came
out looking as haggard as murderer
Balzac, after he had thought out thor
oughly one of his philosophical romances,
and amassed his materials in most labo-
rious manner, retired to his study, and
from that time until his book had gone to
press, society saw him no more. When he
appeared again among his friends, he
looked, said his publisher, in the popular
phrase, like his own ghost. The manu-
script was afterwards altered and copied,
when it passed into the hands of the print
er, from whose slips the book was rewrit-
ten for the third time. Again it went into
the hands of the printer-two, three, and
sometimes four separate proofs being re-
CURED before the authors leave could be got
to send the perpetually rewritten book to
press at last, and so have done with it. He
was literally the terror of all printers and
editors. Moore thought it quick work if
he wrote seventy lines of ''Lalln Rookh''
in week. Kinglake's ''Eothen,' we are
told, was rewritten five or six times, and
was kept in the authors writing-desk al
most as long as Wordsworth kept the
''White Doe of RYlstone," and kept, like
that, to he taken out for review and cor
rection almost every day. Buttons ''Stud-
les of Nature'' cost him fifty years of labor,
and he recopied it eighteen times before
he sent it to the printer. "He composed
in singular manners writing on large
sized paper, in which, +; S in a ledger, five
distinct columns were ruled. In the first
column he wrote down the first thoughts
in the second, he corrected, enlarged, and
pruned it; and so on, until he had reached
the fifth column, within which he finally
wrote the result of his labor, But even
after this, he would recompose a sentence
twenty times, and once devoted fourteen
hours to finding the proper word with
which to round off a PERIOD" John Eos
ter often spent hours on a single sentence.
Ten years elapsed between the first sketch
of Goldsmith Traveller and it's compile
ton. La Rochefoucauld spent fifteen years
in preparing his little book of maxims, al
tering some of them, Segrais says, nearly
thirty times. We all know how Sheridan
polished his wit and finished his jokes, the
same things being found on different bits
of paper, differently expressed. Rogers
showed Crabb Robinson a note to his
s'Italy,'' which, he said, took him two
weeks to write. 1t consists of very few
lines.-A. p. Russell.