Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1877-03-23
What it Costs to Write Well.

Excellence is not matured in a day, and
the cost of it is an old story. The begin
ming of Plato's Republic. it is said, was
fonnd IN his tablet written over II over
a variety of ways. Addison, we are told
wore out the patience of his printer; fire.
quently, when nearly a whole l preston
of the Spectator was worked off. he
would stop the press to insert some new
proposition. Lambs most sportiye essays
were the result of most intense brain labor I;
he used to spend a week at a time ID elabo-
rating a single humorous letter to a friend.
Tennyson is reported to have written
( s'Come into the garden, Maud more than
fifty times over before 1t pleased him; and
"Lockley's Hall, 'the first draught OF which
was written in two days, he spent the bet
ter part Of six weeks, for eight hours a day,
inr altering and polishing. Dickens, when
he intended to write a Christmas story,
shut himself up for six weeks, lived the
hagazaard asa murlerer:r$8alza ,ssster he
Mad thought out thoroughly one of his
| philosophical romances, and amassed his
! materials in a most laboriouS manner, re-
tired to his study, and from that tim un-
til his book went 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
manuscript was afterward altered and cop
led. When it passed into the hands OF the
printer, from whose slips the book was re-
written for the third time; again it went
into the hands Of the printer-two, three
and sometimes four separate proofs being
required before the authors leave could be
got to send the perpetually rewritten book
to press at last and to 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 Italia Rookh"
in a 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 Rylsone,'' and kept ike
that, to be taken out for review and cor
rection almost every day. Buffon's ''Stu-
dies Of Nature'' cost him fifty years Of la
Dor, before he sent it to the printer ; "he
composed in q singular manner, writing on
large-siZed paper, in which, as IN a ledger,
five distinct columns were ruled. La the
first column he wrote down the first
thoughts; in the second he corrected, en-
larged and pruned it and SO On until he
reached the fifth column, within which he
finally wrote the result Of his labor. But
even after this he would re-compose q SEN
tence twenty times, and once devoted four
teen 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's "Traveler' and its COM
pletion. acknowledgements spent fifteen
years in preparing his little book Of max
inns, altering 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 diff
ferent bits of paper differently expressed.
Rogers showed Crabb Robinson a note to
his Italy" which, he sad, took him two
weeks to write. 1t consists Of a very few
lines.