in the work. When he began to write "Lalla Rookh" the task was anything but easy to him. He said that he was "at all times a far more slow and painstaking workman than would ever be guessed from the result." For a long time after the conclusion of the agreement with Messrs. Longman, "though generally at work with a view to this task, he made but very little real progress in it." After many unsatisfactory attempts, finding that his subjects were so slow in kindling his own sympathies, he began to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others. "Had this series of disheartening experiments been carried on much further, I must have thrown aside the work in despair." He took the greatest pains in long and laboriously preparing himself by reading. "To form a storehouse, as it were, of illustrations purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself with its various treasures that, quick as Fancy required the aid of fact in her spiritings, the memory was ready to furnish materials for the spell-work; such was, for a long while, the sole object of my studies." After quoting some opinions favorable to the truth of his Oriental coloring, he says: "Whatever of vanity there may be in citing such tributes, they show, at least, of what great value, even in poetry, is that prosaic quality, industry, since it was in a slow and laborious collection of small facts that the first foundations of this fanciful romance were laid." Other fine arts make equally large claims upon the industry of their professors. We see the charming result, which looks as if it were nothing but pleasure--the mere sensuous gratification of an appetite for melody or color; but no one ever eminently succeeded in music or painting without patient submission to a discipline far from attractive or entertaining. An idea was very prevalent amongst the upper classes in England, between twenty and thirty years ago, that art was not a serious pursuit, and that Frenchmen were too frivolous to apply themselves seriously to anything. When, however, the different schools of art in Europe came to be exhibited together, the truth began to dawn upon people's minds that the French and Belgian schools of painting had a certain superiority over the rest--a superiority of quite a peculiar sort; and when the critics applied themselves to discover the hidden causes of this generally perceived superiority, they found out that it was due in great measure to the patient drudgery submitted to by those foreign artists in their youth. English painters who have attained distinction have gone through a like drudgery, if not in the public _atelier_ at least in secrecy and solitude. Mr. John Lewis, in reply to an application for a drawing to be reproduced by the autotype process, and published in the _Portfolio_, said that his sketches and studies were all in color, but if we liked to examine them we were welcome to select anything that might be successfully photographed. Not being in