over-wrought operative, by the light of his candle, whose very burning would be reprehensible as an extravagance, could not the ware fabricated at midnight find an immediate market. The first is an utterance—the second a manufacture. The first speaks with the breath of a peculiar life, and wears the colour of a peculiar scenery—the second is an exercise produced under circumstances, which, however stimulating to energy, are but discouraging to Fancy. We may be told, it is true, that many of our dearest ‘household words’ have been wrung from our greatest men, by the pressure of the cruellest exigency. One poet, to pay for his mother’s funeral, must needs write a ‘Rasselas’—another, under constraint less instant, but perhaps not less harassing, shall gladden England for ever, by calling up _Olivia_ and _Sophia_ in the hayfield, and _Farmer Flamborough’s_ Christmas party, and the Vicar slyly making an end of ‘the wash for the face,’ which his innocently-worldly daughters were brewing. But evidence like this does nothing to contradict our wisdom. Had Johnson been compelled to compose his superb style, at a moment’s warning by the coffin-side; had Goldsmith possessed no treasury of adventure and experience to draw upon, no power to handle the pen already learned—neither _Imlac_ nor _Mrs. Primrose_ would have been alive at this day. Without preparation, training, craftsmanship, there is little literature—there is no art. Ballads may grow up—but not epics be produced, nor five-act plays be constructed, nor tales be woven, nor even a complete lyric be finished. It has fallen to the lot of every one of us too often and again, to see hearts fevered, hopes wrecked, life embittered, and Death (or Madness) courted, because men cannot—and their friends _will not_—sufficiently fix their minds on this plain truth; because inclinations are perpetually mistaken for powers; because, bewildered by some faëry dream that the world in which a Scott is king or a Siddons is queen, is paved with gold—every boy who can cut paragraphs into lengths fancies that he is a Scott—and every girl with a strong voice who loves playgoing, that she is a _Lady Macbeth_, a _Cleopatra_, a _Queen Constance_, who can shake ‘the playhouse down.’