Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred comedies and five hundred essays? What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses, three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra, three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of music busy for the rest of his days. Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime? I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots, hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed? Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves? Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of that sort of people. They defied all the laws of hygiene, ate and drank everything that was bad for them, were totally unconscious of their high destinies as members of the glorious human race, but they had an awfully good time and their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific. And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally true of such finicky subjects as theology. Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred years and you will find their cellars and attics filled with tracts and homilies and discussions and refutations and digests and commentaries in duodecimo and octodecimo and octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in paper, all of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.