xsxv Proceedings of tJie Royal Society of Victoria. 



training. It is not objected that tlie calling is taken up in 

 supplement of other callings, but because it is not the 

 principal avocation, it seems as if it were regarded as 

 unnecessary to study tlie art of literary composition syste- 

 matically. 



A well-known epigrammatist has said, that it requires five 

 years to learn to be a cabinet-maker, but that one may 

 become an author in half an hour. The reply to this was, 

 that it was witty, bat false, for that a literary man has to 

 undergo a long apj^renticeship. His school-life, his college- 

 life, his travels, his hearing, seeing, reading, observing, 

 suffering, all are parts of his training. Then with all this 

 training, he has often to work at labour he does not love, 

 and his writing has to be done furtively, or in the intervals 

 of his enforced daily work. 



Going back for historic examples, we find that Hesiod was 

 an agriculturist, Thucydides a general, Xeuophon a com- 

 mander, Plato and Aristotle schoolmasters. Cicero morever, 

 was a politician, Varro a soldier, Horace first a soldier, 

 then a secretary. And to come nearer to our own times, 

 La Rochefoucauld was a courtier, Montesquieu a judge, 

 Chateaubriand a sub-lieutenant, and Balzac a reader of proofs. 

 And then, as we know, Shakspeare was an actor, Byron a 

 lord, Grote a banker, Dickens a reporter. Cooper a consul, 

 Bancroft a minister, Emerson a pastor, and Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes is a physician. I suppose no man, nor no woman, 

 ever set out upon the journey of life, with the set purpose of 

 being an author, and yet an author, worthy of the name, 

 requires a training harder a great deal than that needed for 

 any other vocation. 



Professor Huxley recently said, " I fancy we are the only 

 nation in the world who seem to think that composition 

 comes by nature. The French attend to their own language, 

 the Germans study their's, but Englishmen do not seem to 

 think it worth their while." As Dogberry has it, so they 

 apparently think that "reading and writing come by 

 nature." 



