There is something melancholy in this, admirable as it is. Macaulay had begun to watch the shadow on the dial too closely to permit him to do much miscellaneous work with an easy mind. There is an important lesson for men of letters in the sentence,--"When I turn from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition." Here lies the great difference between serious literary work and that of ordinary business, where the mind is solicited by one thing after another in rapid succession. In the first case, time and energy have to be expended in evolving from within a fresh impulse for every topic. The most readable writings of Southey are those which he produced fragment by fragment, on topics for which little renewal of impulse was required. To write a great poem in scraps, all by the clock, was a task which only a very conceited and rather wooden man would have attempted; and the result we know, though there are fine things in Southey's longer poems. A powerful passage by Cardinal Newman on the difficulties of literary work is almost too well known to bear quoting, but a living poet, Mrs. Augusta Webster, has put the case so fairly that Macaulay's shade--which is, of course, a shade that reads everything--may be gratified by seeing in a handy way a few of her sentences:-- "Occupations of study, scientific research, literary production--of brain-work of any kind that is carried on in the worker's private home with no visible reminder of customer or client--are taken to be such as can lightly be done at one time as well as another, and resumed after no matter what interruptions, like a lady's embroidery, which she can take up again at the very stitch she left her needle in. Professions of this sort not only admit, but in many instances require, considerable variation in the amount of daily time directly bestowed on them,--_directly_, for the true student is not at his work only when he is ostensibly employed, but whenever and wherever he may have his head to himself,--and there is no measure of visible quantity for the more or less results of application.... The literary man probably fares the worst of all. He is not merely not protected by the manual part of his processes, but it is his danger. It is so easy--what anybody can do at any time!... Of course the simple fact is that it is more difficult for this class of persons to practise their vocations under the drawback of perpetual breaks, actual and (what comes to nearly the same thing) expected, than it is for 'business men.' Let the attention of the solicitor, for instance, busied on the points of an intricate case, be perforce diverted to another matter, there is lost from that case just the time diverted, and a little extra to allow for the mind which returns to any interrupted course of thought, never returning