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school-time better than holiday-time; that they liked work better than play. I have seen, with joy, manly little fellows repudiating the odious and unnatural sentiment; and declar ing manfully that they preferred cricket to Ovid.

8. And if any boy ever tells you that he would rather learn his lessons than go out to the play-ground, beware of that boy. Either his health is drooping, and his mind becoming prematurely and unnaturally developed, or he is a little humbug. He is an impostor. He is seeking to obtain credit under false pretences. Depend upon it, unless it really be that he is a poor little spiritless man, deficient in nerve and muscle, and unhealthily precocious in intellect, he has in him the elements of a sneak; and he wants nothing but time to ripen him into a pickpocket, a swindler, a horsedealer, or a British bank-director.

9. Every one, then, naturally hates work, and loves its opposite, play. And let it be remarked that not idleness, but play, is the opposite of work. But some people are so happy as to be able to idealize their work into play; or they have so great a liking for their work, that they do not feel their work as effort, and thus the element is eliminated which makes work a pain. How I envy those human beings who have such enjoyment in their work that it ceases to be work at all!

10. There is my friend Mr. Tinto, the painter; he is never so happy as when he is busy at his canvas, drawing forth from it forms of beauty; he is up at his work almost as soon as he has daylight for it; he paints all day, and he is sorry when the twilight compels him to stop. He delights in his work, and so his work becomes play.

11. I suppose the kind of work which, in the case of ordinary men, never ceases to be work, never loses the conscious feeling of strain and effort, is that of composition. A great poet, possibly, may find much pleasure in writing, and there have been exceptional men who said they never were so happy as when they had the pen in their hand. Buffon, I think, tells us that once he wrote for fourteen hours at a stretch, and all that time was in a state of positive enjoyment; and Lord Macaulay, in the preface to his recently published

Speeches, assures us that the writing of his History is the occupation and the happiness of his life.

12. Well, I am glad to hear it. Ordinary mortals cannot sympathize with the feeling. To them, composition is simply hard work, and hard work is pain. Of course, even commonplace men have occasionally had their moments of inspiration, when thoughts present themselves vividly, and clothe themselves in felicitous expressions, without much or any conscious effort. But these seasons are short and far between; and although while they last, it becomes comparatively pleasant to write, it never becomes so pleasant as it would be to lay down the pen, to lean back in the easy chair, to take up the Times or Fraser,t and enjoy the luxury of being carried easily along that track of thought which cost its writer so much labor to pioneer through the trackless jungle of the world of mind.

*

13. Ah, how easy it is to read what it was so difficult to write! There is all the difference between running down from London to Manchester by the railway after it has been made, and making the railway from London to Manchester. You, my intelligent reader, who begin to read a chapter of Mr. Froude's eloquent History, and get on with it so fluently, are like the snug old gentleman, traveling-capped, railwayrugged, great-coated, and plaided, who leans back in the corner of the softly-cushioned carriage as it flits over Chat Moss; while the writer of the chapter is like George Stephenson, toiling month after month to make the track along which you speed, in the face of difficulties and discouragements which you never think of.

14. And so I say, it may sometimes be somewhat easy and pleasant to write, but never so easy and pleasant as it is not to write. The odd thing, too, about the work of the pen is this that it is often done best by the men who like it least and shrink from it most, and that that is often the most laborious writing along which the reader's mind glides most easily and pleasurably. It is not so in other matters. As the general rule, no man does well the work which he dislikes. man will be a good preacher who dislikes preaching. No man will be a good anatomist who hates dissecting.

*A newspaper in London.

↑ An English magazine.

No

Sir

Charles Napier, it must be confessed, was a great soldier though he hated fighting; and as for writing, some men have been the best writers who hated writing, and who would never have penned a line but under the pressure of necessity.

15. There is John Foster: what a great writer he was. And yet his biography tells us, in his own words too, scores of times, how he shrunk away from the intense mental effort of composition; how he abhorred it and dreaded it, though he did it so admirably well. There is Coleridge: how that great mind ran to waste, because Coleridge shrank from the painful labor of formal composition; and so Christabel must remain unfinished: and so, instead of volumes of hoarded wisdom and wit, we have but the fading remembrances of hours of marvelous talk. I do not by any means intend to assert that there are not worse things than work, even than very hard work; but I say that work, as work, is a bad thing. 16. It may once have been otherwise, but the curse is in it We do it because we must: it is our duty: we live by it; it is the Creator's intention that we should; it makes us enjoy leisure and recreation and rest; it stands between us and the pure misery of idleness; it is dignified and honorable; it is the soil and the atmosphere in which grow cheerfulness, hopefulness, health of body and mind. But still, if we could get all these good ends without it, we should be glad. We do not care for exertion for its own sake. Even Mr. Kingsley does not love the north-east wind for itself, but because of the good things that come with it and from it.

now.

17. Work is not an end in itself. "The end of work," said Aristotle, "is to enjoy leisure;" or, as The Minstrel hath it, "the end and the reward of toil is rest." I do not wish to draw from too sacred a source the confirmation of these summer-day fancies; but I think, as I write, of the descriptions which we find in a certain Volume of the happiness of another world. Has not many an over-wrought and wearied. out worker found comfort in an assurance of which I shall here speak no further, that "there remaineth a rest to the people of God”?

XCVI. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

1. And so, my reader, if it be true that nobody, anywhere, would (in his sober senses) work if he could help it, how especially true is that great principle on this beautiful July day! It is truly a day on which to do nothing. I am here, far in the country, and when I this moment went to the window, and looked out upon a rich summer landscape, everything seemed asleep. The sky is sapphire-blue, without a cloud; the sun is pouring down a flood of splendor upon all things; there is not a breath stirring, hardly the twitter of a bird. All the air is filled with the fragrance of the young clover. The landscape is richly wooded; I never saw the trees more thickly covered with leaves, and now they are perfectly still.

2. I am writing north of the Tweed,* and the horizon is of blue hills, which some Southrons † would call mountains. The wheat fields are beginning to have a little of the harvesttinge, and they contrast beautifully with the deep green of the hedge-rows. The roses are almost over, but I can see plenty of honeysuckle in the hedges still, and a perfect blaze of it has covered one projecting branch of a young oak. I am looking at a little well-shaven green (I shall not call it a lawn, because it is not one), it has not been mown for nearly a fortnight, and it is perfectly white with daisies. Beyond, at a very short distance, through the branches of many oaks, I can see a gable of the church, and a few large gravestones shining white among the green grass and leaves.

3. I do not find all these things any great temptation now, for I have got interested in my work, and I like to write of them. But I found it uncommonly hard to sit down this morning to my work. Indeed, I found it impossible, and thus it is that at five o'clock P. M. I have got no further than the present line. I had quite resolved that this morning I would sit doggedly down to my essay, in which I have really (though the reader may find it hard to believe it) got something to say; but when I walked out after breakfast, I felt that all nature was saying that this was not a day

* A river in Scotland. † A name applied in Scotland to the English.

for work.

Come forth and look at me, seemed the message breathed from her beautiful face. And then I thought of Wordsworth's ballad, which sets out so pleasing an excuse for idleness::

4.

"Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife,

Come, hear the woodland linnet!

How sweet his music! On my life,

There's more of wisdom in it.

"And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher :
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

"She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless,-
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can! ""

5: Just at my gate, the man who keeps in order the roads ot the parish was hard at work. How pleasant, I thought, to work amid the pure air and the sweet-smelling clover! And how pleasant, too, to have work to do of such a nature that when you go to it every morning you can make quite sure that, barring accident, you will accomplish a certain amount before the sun shall set; while as for the man whose work is that of the brain and the pen, he never can be certain in the morning how much his day's labor may amount to.

6. He may sit down at his desk, spread out his paper, have his ink in the right place, and his favorite pen, and yet he may find that he cannot get on, that thoughts will not come, that his mind is utterly sterile, that he cannot see his way through his subject, or that if he can produce anything at all it is poor miserable stuff, whose poorness no one knows better than himself. And so, after hours of effort and discouragement, he may have to lay his work aside, having accomplished nothing, having made no progress at all—wea

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