wrote without effort, and as if the charms of his style were the gift of nature rather than the product of art, so spontaneously do they appear to flow from his pen. It was the general opinion of his literary friends that he wrote with great rapidity, and made few corrections in his manuscripts. On the contrary, we are told by his nephew and biographer, that he never allowed a sentence to pass until it was as good as he could make it, and would often re-write paragraphs and whole chapters that he might gain even a slight improvement in arrangement or expression. After writing thus carefully, he corrected again remorselessly, and his manuscripts were covered with erasures. He paid equal attention to proof-sheets. "He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water." To Napier, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, he wrote from Calcutta: "At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast." Carlyle, Miss Martineau says, erred on the side of fastidiousness. "Almost every word was altered, and revise followed revise." Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the violin, answered, "Twelve hours a day for twenty years together." Buelow is reported to have said, "If I stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices it." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Titian, we are told, after laying his foundation with a few bold strokes, would turn the picture to the wall, and leave it there perhaps for months, turning it round again after a time to look at it carefully, and scan the parts as he would the face of his greatest enemy. If at this time any portion of it should appear to him to have been defective, he would set to work to correct it, applying remedies as a surgeon would apply them, cutting off excrescences here, superabundant flesh there, redressing an arm, adjusting or setting a limb, regardless of the pain which it might cause. In this way he would reduce the whole to a certain symmetry, put it aside, and return again a third or more times till the first quintessence had been covered over with its padding of flesh. Then came the finishing, which was done at as many more different paintings, to say nothing of the innumerable last touches--with his fingers as well as with his brush--of which he is said to have been particularly fond. It is a received opinion that Edmund Kean's acting was wholly spontaneous and unstudied; this is a mistake. A contemporary, writing of