The first name I find on my list of novelists who have been subject to ill health is that of Cervantes. He did not start life an invalid,—far from it. He seems to have been a youth of unusual vigor. But when only twenty-three years old he was severely wounded and lost his left hand in battle—“For the greater glory of the right,” as he gallantly exclaimed. After that he spent five years in slavery and he escaped from the Moors only to languish at various times in a Spanish prison. Hardship, and privations doubtless, and also his old wounds, had completely shattered his health when he finally sat down to create his immortal “Don Quixote.” The first part was published when he was fifty-eight years old, the last when he was sixty-nine. When Fielding wrote “Tom Jones,” he had been for years a martyr to gout and other diseases: Gibbon predicted for this work “a diuturnity exceeding that of the house of Austria!” It is curious that this book, which bubbles over with the joy of life, was written at a time when Fielding was plunged into the deepest melancholy. Swift suffered from “labyrinthian vertigo.” Laurence Sterne, creator of “Tristram Shandy,” was consumptive, as he says of himself, “from the first hour I drew breath unto this that I can hardly breathe at all.” Sterne, no longer young, was increasingly suffering during the years he brought forth the numerous volumes of his unique book. Sir Walter Scott was not only lame from infancy but is an inspiring example of what can be accomplished under conditions of extreme physical suffering. When he was forty-six years old began a series of agonizing attacks of cramps of the stomach which recurred at frequent intervals for two years. But his activity and capacity for work remained unbroken. He made his initial attempt at play-writing when he was recovering from this first seizure. Before the year was out he had completed “Rob Roy.” Within six months it was followed by “The Heart of Midlothian,” which filled four volumes of the second series of “Tales of my Landlord,” and has remained one of the most popular among his novels. “The Bride of Lammermoor” and “The Legend of Montrose” were dictated to amanuenses, through fits of suffering so acute that he could not suppress cries of agony. When Laidlaw begged him to stop dictating he only answered, “Nay, Willie, only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry, as well as all the wool to ourselves, but to give over work, that can only be when I am woolen.”