Bound up, for example, with the proofs furnished by the Diary of Scott’s prodigious literary industry, there is plenty of minute information as to his habits of composition and his rate of composition. I do not like that word “composition” in any such application, thinking it a miserable word for the description of the process by which a great writer marshals the contents of his mind and commits them to paper; but the word is current, and may serve for the nonce. Well, Scott’s rate of composition was about the fastest known in the history of literature. Of all his predecessors in the literary history of the British Islands, Shakespeare seems to have been the likest to him in this particular of fluent facility and swiftness of production. “His mind and hand went together,” is the well-known report concerning Shakespeare by his literary executors and editors: “his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” One has an impression, however, that Shakespeare, with all his facility when he had the pen in his hand, had it less constantly in his hand, was less “_eident_” in the use of it (as our good northern phrase goes), than Scott,—whether because he had less actual need to be “eident,” or because verse, which was Shakespeare’s main element, is intrinsically more difficult, takes more out of a man in a given time, and so is less favourable to “eidency,” than the prose element in which, latterly, Scott worked all but exclusively. At all events, “eidency” and “facility” taken together, the result, in the mere matter of quantity, was larger from Scott’s industry than from Shakespeare’s. But it is with the “facility” that we are now concerned, and with the proofs of this “facility” which are furnished by the Journal in particular. The mere look of the handwriting is one of these,—that rapid _currente calamo_ look, without hesitation, and with hardly an erasure, stoppage to point, or any such thing, and with the words almost running into each other in their hurry, which is familiar to all who have seen facsimile reproductions of any portions of the copy of Scott’s novels, when they were written with his own hand, and not dictated. That, however, is a characteristic common to all his writings; and the specific interest of the Diary in this connection is that it gives us definite information as to the amount of writing per day which Scott usually got through in his _currente calamo_ style. In entry after entry there is note of the number of pages he had prescribed to himself as a sufficient day’s “task” or “darg,” with growls when for any reason he had fallen short of it, and smiles of satisfaction when he had exceeded it; and from one entry we ascertain that his _maximum_ per day when he was in good vein was eight pages of his own close manuscript, making forty pages of the usual type in which his copy was set up by the printers.