fatigue."[364] This seems hardly a fair return for the poet's appeal to Ellis in one of the epistles of _Marmion_:[365] "Come listen! bold in thy applause, The bard shall scorn pedantic laws." Another introduction in the same poem is given up to a justification of the author's "unconfined" style, on the score of his love for the wild songs of his own country and the freedom of his early training.[366] Scott practically never rewrote his prose, and the result gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his _Journal_: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing at once. I have done a dozen things at once all my life."[369] But the making of poetry required more attention. "Verse I write twice, and sometimes three times over,"[370] he said, and one is moved to wonder whether the distaste for writing poetry, that he professed about 1822, arose largely from a growing aversion to what he probably considered extreme care in composition.[371] A series of three comments on his own poetry may be given to illustrate his widely varying moods in regard to it. They are all taken from letters written not far from the time when _Marmion_ was published. "As for poetry, it is very little labour to me; indeed 'twere pity of my life should I spend much time on the light and loose sort of poetry which alone I can pretend to write."[372] "I believe no man now alive writes more rapidly than I do (no great recommendation), but I never think of making verses till I have a sufficient stock of poetical ideas to supply them."[373] "If I ever write another poem, I am determined to make every single couplet of it as perfect as my uttermost care and attention can possibly effect."[374] In spite of this momentary resolution to take more pains with his next poem, he was unable to do so when the time came; or if, as in the case of _Rokeby_ he did make the attempt, the results seemed to him unsatisfactory. Yet verse required much more careful finishing than prose, even when it was written by Scott, and this fact has been too little emphasized in discussions of his transition from verse to prose romances.