loo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



view of evening and candle-light," to quote his commentator, De 

 Quincey, once more, " as involved in the full delight of literature," may 

 seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the 

 nature of such gayeties to travel a little into exaggeration ; but sub- 

 stantially it is certain that Lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually 

 in the direction here indicated. His literary studies, whether taking 

 the color of tasks or diversions, courted the aid of evening, which by 

 means of physical weariness jjroduces a more luxurious state of repose 

 than belongs to the labor-hours of day; they courted the aid of lamp- 

 light, which, as Lord Bacon remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human 

 })omps and pleasures such as would be vainly sought from the homeli- 

 ness of daylight." Those words " physical weai'iness," if they do not 

 contain the whole philosophy of the matter, are very near it, and are 

 at all events more to the point than the quotation from Lord Bacon. 

 They almost exactly define that non-natural condition of the body 

 which, on other grounds, appears to be proper to the non-natural exer- 

 cise of the mind. It will be remembered that Balzac recommended the 

 night for the artist's work, the day for the author's drudgery. Southey, 

 who knew how to work and how to get the best and the most out of 

 himself as well as anybody who ever put pen to paper, and who pur- 

 sued the same daily routine throughout his whole literary life, per- 

 formed his tasks in the following order : From breakfast till dinner, 

 history, transcription for the press, and, in general, all the work that 

 Scott calls " walking on all fours." From dinner till tea, reading, let- 

 ter-writing, the newspapers, and frequently a siesta he, also, was an 

 heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had the chance. After tea, poe- 

 try, or whatever else his fancy chose whatever work called upon the 

 creative power. It is true that he went to bed regularly at half-past 

 ten, so that his actual consumption of midnight oil was not extrava- 

 gant. But such of it as he did consume was taken as a stimulant for 

 the purely imaginative part of his work, when the labor that required 

 no stimulant was over and done. Blake was a painter by day and a 

 poet tjy niglit ; he often got out of bed at midnight and wrote for 

 hours, following by instinct the deliberate practice of less impulsive 

 workers. ISTow, bodily weariness is simply bodily indolence induced 

 artificially ; its production by hard walking, hard riding, hard living, or 

 hard study, looks like an instinctive effort on the part of energetic men 

 to put themselves for the time and for a purpose into the chronically 

 unhealthy condition of naturally indolent men. Indolence, that is to say 

 chronic fatigue, appears to be the natural habit of imaginative brains. 

 It is a commonplace to note that men of fertile fancy, as a class, have 

 been notorious for their horror of the work of formulating their ideas 

 even by the toil of thought, much more by passing them through the 

 crucible of the ink-bottle. In many cases they have needed the very 

 active stimulant of hunger. The cacoethes scrihendi is a disease com- 

 mon, not to imaginative, but to imitative minds. Probably no hewer 



