started at last. It is the easiest thing in the world to write a book: but it is nearly impossible to begin one. That is the reason why every man who can sign his name does not belong to the Guild of Literature.' His feelings are as acute, his passions as tense and imaginative, as your own; he can fuse them into eloquent deeds, into eloquent speech; he can charge the enemy at the head of his column, he can ask the woman he loves to give him back his heart, or her own; but he cannot write a book. And why? Because he does not know how to begin. The incapacity is no doubt a merciful provision for if we all wrote, there would be none to read. Most authors resemble the late mild-eyed laureate; they never read anythingheartily at least that is written by other people. Wordsworth, indeed, professed to study profoundly, and admire keenly, the Book of Nature; but, on cross-examination, it would no doubt have appeared that he did not think nearly so well of it as of his own account of it. Moreover, none would be left to work. There would be no eloquent statesmen, no gallant soldiers, no indefatigable explorers; the fire-struck words would never again, like hail-stones, strike upon the upturned faces of

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VOL. LXV. NO. CCCLXXXV.

never again sweep through the cloudy valley, and dream as they fell of the triumphant tears that were wept for them in the Holy Land. The moment we all took to writing, nothing would remain to write about; for the career of a writing-man is the most prosaic of all careers, and bears telling least of any. I would rather hear of Columbus, or of Drake, or of Wellington, or of the meanest trooper in his army, than learn how Walter Scott wrote Marmion, or how Shakspeare wrote Macbeth. For

those take us with them into the vivid pressure of living men, and under the smoky glare of battle, or the sad twilight of defeat, human nature acquires a powerful and bewitching interest. 'The Duke's' life is our great national epic; and it was a better epic acted by him than written by Tennyson.

This incapacity to begin is not, however, confined to the writing of books. Most men would be estimable, charitable, religious, successful, if they only knew how to begin. Jones really desires to do something for the working-classes: but he does not know where or how to begin; and so he does nothing. Robinson, profoundly versed in the principles of jurisprudence, fails at the bar; when Brown, who knows

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