Julian Fane--His late hours--Regularity produced by habit--The time of the principal effort--That the chief work should be done in the best hours--Physicians prefer early to late work--The practice of Goethe and some modern authors--The morning worker ought to live in a tranquil neighborhood--Night-work--The medical objection to it--The student's objection to day-work--Time to be kept in masses by adults, but divided into small portions by children--Rapid turning of the mind--Cuvier eminent for this faculty--The Duke of Wellington--The faculty more available with some occupations than others--The slavery of a minute obedience to the clock--Broad rules the best--Books of agenda, good in business, but not in the higher intellectual pursuits. What you told me of your habits in the employment of your hours reminded me of Julian Fane. Mr. Lytton tells us that "after a long day of professional business, followed by a late evening of social amusement, he would return in the small hours of the night to his books, and sit, unwearied, till sunrise in the study of them. Nor did he then seem to suffer from this habit of late hours. His nightly vigils occasioned no appearance of fatigue the next day.... He rarely rose before noon, and generally rose much later." But however irregular a man's distribution of his time may be in the sense of wanting the government of fixed rules, there always comes in time a certain regularity by the mere operation of habit. People who get up very late hardly ever do so in obedience to a rule; many get up early by rule, and many more are told that they ought to get up early, and believe it, and aspire to that virtue, but fail to carry it into practice. The late-risers are rebels and sinners--in this respect--to a man, and so persistently have the wise, from Solomon downwards, harped upon the moral loveliness of early rising and the degradation which follows the opposite practice, that one can hardly get up after eight without either an uncomfortable sense of guilt or an extraordinary callousness. Yet the late-risers, though obeying no rule, for the abandoned sinner recognizes none, become regular in their late rising from the gradual fixing power of habit. Even Julian Fane, though he regretted his desultory ways, "and dwelt with great earnestness on the importance of regular habits of work," was perhaps less irregular than he himself believed. We are sure to acquire habits; what is important is not so much that the habits should be regular, as that their regularity should be of the kind most favorable in the long run to the accomplishment of our designs, and this never comes by chance, it is the result of an effort of the will in obedience to governing wisdom.