A writer's experience in Bath. A man of genius and a lord. as it lay before me) in the heart of a stranger from three thousand miles over the sea!" Some years ago, a writer in Temple Bar, when in Bath, being anxious to amuse himself with verifying all the places and streets, etc., mentioned in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, he turned into a library close to Milsom Street, and asked for the volume; he was told not only that they had not got it, but had never even heard of Jane Austen! And what was still worse, and hurt his feelings more, was that when he sought the inn which her genius had made so memorable, though he found it, lo and behold! it was no longer the White Hart, it had sunk into the Queen, or the Royal Hotel, or something equally commonplace. When Swift was desired by Lord Oxford to introduce Parnell to his acquaintance, he refused, upon this principle, that a man of genius was a character superior to that of a lord. in a high station; he therefore obliged his lordship to walk with his treasurer's staff from room to room through his own department, inquiring which was Dr. Parnell, in order to introduce himself, and beg the honor of his acquaintance. Dr. James Alexander, describing a visit to the India House, says he inquired for Charles Lamb of the old doorkeeper, who replied he had been there since he was sixteen years old, and had never heard of any Mr. Lamb. But the doorkeeper of the British Museum knew him very well. Not long after Irving Irving. had attained celebrity in Great Britain by his writings, an English lady and her daughter were passing along some gallery in Italy and paused before a bust of Washington. After gazing at it for a few moments, the daughter turned to her mother with the question: "Mother, who was Washington?" "Why, my dear, don't you know?" was the astonished reply; "he wrote the Sketch Book." The health of Darwin was anything but good; and Darwin. an old family servant a woman over hearing his daughter express some anxiety about his condition, sought to reassure her by saying: "Hi believe master'd be hall right, madam, hif 'e only 'ad something to hoccupy 'is mind; sometimes 'e stands in the conservatory from mornin' till night -just a lookin' at the flowers. Hif 'e only 'ad somethin' to do, 'e 'd be hevver so much better, hi'm sure." An ignorant old fellow who had known Hawthorne was met Hawthorne. by Mr. Harry Fenn in Salem, who vouch Samuel SUBSISTING safed to the artist the information that Hawthorne "writ a lot o' letters - I heern he wrote a scarlet letter or two, whatever that is." The great-grandniece of Mrs. Barbauld gives in her recently published Memories many interesting anecdotes of the writers of the last generation. Concerning Samuel Rogers, whose generosity and whose polished manners she praises, she says: "Going one night to the gallery of the opera, which he thought the best place for hearing, he noticed a respectable-looking elderly man gazing at him very intently for some time. At last between the acts he left his seat, and placing himself in front of Mr. Rogers, said in a solemn tone, 'Pray, sir, is your name Samuel Rogers?' Mr. Rogers, who always cherished the hope that his works were popular with the lower classes, replied most graciously that it was. 'Then, sir,' said the man, 'I should be glad to know, if you please, why you have changed your poulterer ?'" Literature has been pronounced a good staff but a bad crutch, - fascinating, cheering, and enlivening, tending to promote life, health, and an equable mind in those Haw- Literature as a trade. who pursue it for pleasure; but woe to those who are dependent upon their brains for daily bread, — thrice woe, if others are dependent upon them. Coleridge advised, never pursue literature as a trade. thorne, wrote, God keep me from ever being really a writer for bread. Lamb exclaims, in a letter to Barton: "What! throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance of employment of booksellers would afford you? Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock slap-dash, headlong down upon iron spikes. I have known many authors want bread: some repining, others enjoying the sweet security of a spunging-house; all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers, what not, rather than the things they were ! I have known some starved some go mad—one dear friend literally dying in a work-house. O! you know not, may you never know, the miseries of subsisting by authorship! 'Tis a pretty ap- A pretty ap pendage to situations like yours or mine, pendage. but a slavery worse than all slavery to be a bookseller's dependent; to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton; to change your free thoughts and Herder's advice. voluntary numbers for ungracious taskwork! The booksellers hate us." "With the greatest possible solicitude," urged Herder, "avoid authorship. Too early or immediately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A person who reads only to print, in all probability reads amiss; and he who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor." "Writing for the press," says John Stuart Mill, “cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to any one qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought; not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of liveliSome views hood, especially if the writer has a conscience and will not consent to serve any opinions except his own, but also because the writings by which one can live are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best. Books destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written, come, in general, too slowly into of Mill's. |