Excellence is not matured in a day, and the cost of it is an old story. The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over and over in a variety of ways. It took Virgil, it is stated, three years to compose his ten short eclogues; seven years to elaborate his Georgics, which comprise little more than two thousand verses; and he employed more than twelve years in polishing his AEneid, being even then so dissatisfied with it, that he wished before his death to commit it to the flames. Horace was equally indefatigable, and there are single odes in his works which must have cost him months of labor. Lucretius's one poem represents the toil of a whole life-time. Thucydides was twenty years writing his history, which is comprised in one octavo volume. Gibbon wrote the first chapter of his work three times before he could please himself. Montesquieu, alluding in a letter to one of his works, says to his correspondent, "You will read it in a few hours, but the labor expended on it has whitened my hair." Henri Beyle transcribed his History of Painting in Italy seventeen times. Sainte-Beuve often spent a whole week on two or three octavo pages. Gray was so fastidious in polishing and perfecting his Elegy, that he kept it nearly twenty years, touching it up and improving it. There is a poem of ten lines in Waller's works, which he himself informs us, took him a whole summer to put into shape. Malherbe would spoil half a quire of paper in composing and discomposing and recomposing a stanza. It is reckoned that during the twenty-five most prolific years of his life he composed no more than, on the average, thirty-three verses per annum. There is a good story told of him, which illustrates amusingly the elaborate care he took with his poems. A certain nobleman of his acquaintance had lost his wife, and was anxious that Malherbe should dedicate an ode to her memory, and condole with him in verse on the loss he had sustained. Malherbe complied, but was so fastidious in his composition, that it was three years before the elegy was completed. Just before he sent it in, he was intensely chagrined to find that his noble friend had solaced himself with a new bride, and was, consequently, in no humor to be pestered with an elegy on his old one. When dying, his confessor, in speaking of the happiness in heaven, expressed himself inaccurately. "Say no more about it," said Malherbe, "or your style will disgust me with it." Miss Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Hume, and Fox, have all recorded the trouble they took. Tasso was unwearied in correcting; so were Pope and Boileau. The Cambridge manuscript of Milton's Lycidas shows numerous erasures and interlineations. Pascal spent twenty days in perfecting a single letter. The fables of La Fontaine were copied and re-copied over and over again. Alfieri was laboriously painstaking in composition. We are told that if he approved of his first sketch of a