the famous physician illustrates in the following story:

66

'Many years ago I used to write for a medical periodical. On returning home one day after a very heavy day's work at the hospital, and feeling completely exhausted, I found a note from the editor: Please let me have an article on such and such a subject to-night.' I sat down with pen and paper before me, but not a word could I write.

"Then I lay back lazily, and began to speculate as to the cause of my want of ideas. I thought: The brain is the same as it was yesterday, but yesterday I was not tired; perhaps it is the feebler circulation that prevents the brain from acting. If the blood does not go up to the brain, I may bring the brain down to the blood.' I therefore placed my head flat on the table, looking sideways at the paper, and began to write easily.

"On raising my head again every idea fled, so I placed my head again down on the table, and finished the article with my head in that position.

"A similar instance was afforded by the practice of the late Mr. Lecky, the historian. He had a large, magnificent head, mounted upon a long neck and a willowy body. He found out that his circulation was not sufficiently strong to raise the blood to his brain in sufficient quantity for its functional activity in the upright position..

"A mutual friend informed me that he wrote his History' lying upon the sofa. I was so much interested in the question that I asked Mr. Lecky himself. He told me that this was a mistake; that he did not lie down, but actually wrote kneeling on a sofa which had a large, broad head to it.

"This served him for a writing table, and in this kneeling position he wrote all his works, the blood having thus to travel to his brain in a horizontal line, instead of upward against the force of gravity, as it would have to do in the sitting position."

Reade. In an English review is recalled the method in which Charles Reade constructed his romances directly from docu

ments.

The review says,

among other things: "Charles Reade spent five hours a day in a room that he called 'the workshop.' The most conspicuous piece of furniture in this room was a large table, battered and worn, underneath which there stood an odd score of tall folios, the nature of their contents being indicated by labels upon the backs. At this table Charles Reade would sit, selecting, cutting, and pasting into its proper place every scrap of fact or experience, written or printed, that he judged to contain anything of interest — anything, that is, which might conceivably be of use to him as literary material. Everything was indexed. Anything could be found at a moment's notice. The culmination of the system was to be found in the Index ad Indices. From the Index ad Indices he could find his way to the correct index. From the correct index he could find his way to the. particular slip or cutting that he wanted, at the moment. His workshop was a triumph of method. His art was a triumph of empiricism.

"It was the peculiarity of Charles Reade that he must begin with dry bones in order to arrive at something very like flesh and blood. He had the power to imagine and to inform his creatures with the breath of life, but his imagination was of the kind that abhorred a vacuum. Taking certain

facts which he had seen correlated in his actual experience, he would pass them through his intelligence, plunge them into the great reservoirs of his emotion, and bring them forth, again more real than reality itself. The greater artists dare more highly than this. They get their fundamental truths from life; and, having these touchstones, they build up their masterpieces by rearranging and not necessarily by accepting what they see. Charles Reade He There he

had not enough imagination for this. was safe only in his workshop. could not go wrong. He had all his facts to hand. He had imagination enough to explain them, to quicken them into something more real; but his imagination

faltered when he was asked to shape the bricks as well as to build the house.

"It was this quality of Charles Reade's mind that marked him out as the man to write the best historical novel in our language."

Sienkiewicz-Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of "Quo Vadis," says he can write to his satisfaction only when he uses scarlet ink. Passing through Milan recently, he said:

"I started to write a book on the Venice of the Doges, but had to lay it aside on account of the extraordinary complexity and peculiarity of Venetian history. I no longer have inspirations like that which produced 'Quo Vadis.' That I obtained by studying three masterpieces; one by Tacitus, my favorite among the Latin classics; one by Chateaubriand, 'The Genius of Christianity'; and, most valued of all, Cardinal Wiseman's Fabiola,' a beautiful, picturesque .story which fascinated me in boyhood.

"I am now revising for an autumn volume a novelette, to be called 'The Whirlwind,' which appeared lately in a Warsaw newspaper. After that is done I am anxious to devote my remaining energies to a theme that has long been my special delight, the personality of Napoleon the Great."

Stoddard. Charles Warren Stoddard, the poet, author of "South Sea Idyls," who died recently at Monterey, was supposed to have left a number of unpublished poems, several of which he read to his friends while on his sick bed. After his death, when A. M. Robertson, the publisher, and Miss Ina D. Coolbrith searched his effects they found nothing. His housekeeper at Monterey was appealed to, and she told a remarkable story, asserting that the dying poet burned all his manuscripts a day or two before his death. She said he called her to his room, ordered a fire built in the grate, and then handed her a mass of manuscript to burn. When these papers were all in ashes, he sank back satisfied. Stoddard wrote two poems just before death, "In the Shadow" and "When Life Frowns." They were extremely pessimistic, but were characterized as exquisitely poetical by those who read

Tarkington. Up to the time of the publication of "The Gentleman from Indiana," the rewards which Booth Tarkington had reaped from literature amounted to, by his own confession, just $22.50. Of this amount, $20 had come to him in a check from Life in payment for a sketch and drawing which he submitted. The fact that the editor took pains to assure him that $13 was for the drawing and only $7 for the accompanying literary matter almost persuaded him to adopt art as a career.

Indeed, he went so far as to give up verse and prose altogether for a time. Sketch after sketch he turned out, as many as fifty in all, and on no one of them was he able to realize a cent. Thus repulsed, he once more took up the arduous task of convincing the publishers that he could write a novel which people would care to read.

On the subject of his long apprenticeship Mr. Tarkington has himself spoken, not without a little pardonable self-complacency at the tenacity of purpose which he manifested.

"I was for five years and more," he writes, one of the rejected -as continuously and successively, I suppose, as any one who ever wrote. I sent short stories to almost all the magazines, to receive in every case the manuscript and printed slip-usually almost simultaneously, it seemed to me (they came back too soon), with my sending of them. It was a long sitting, with not the faintest hint of encouragement, and I can't say just why my years of total rejection - a quite unbroken series - did n't discourage I'm not sorry now that I met with no acceptance." - Chicago Tribune.

me.

Tennyson. As I sat before lunch with Hallam Lord Tennyson in the study at Aldworth, I asked him to tell me something of his father's method of life and doing his work. As he was since his very young manhood the constant companion of his father, his remembrance was almost the same as though coming from the great poet himself. "My father," he said, rose fairly early.

8 o'clock, pipe - the absolutely

He had, after his breakfast at what he called his sacred' first of the day. This time was his own, and he was not on any account to be interrupted or disturbed. His scheme of whatever work he had in hand was then elaborated, and he wrote then more easily than at any other time. Before breakfast he would walk on the terrace overlooking the big view. From about eleven to one he would go for a long walk, generally taking me with him, and always in later life with Karenina, the Russian wolfhound, whose picture we have been looking at. You will call to mind his wonderful flow of talk, his humorous sayings, his anecdotes, his 'rugged maxims hewn from life.' Sometimes during his walk he would be full of his work, making lines and rolling them out to me you remember what a fine and sonorous voice he had 'like the wind among the pine woods,' Carlyle called it. But his eyes seemed to be busy all the time. He was drinking in all that nature was giving him. In the midst of his speaking he would often suddenly stop and look at something, some flower, or shrub, or beautiful tree; some effect of light on the distant landscape; some change wrought by time or stress of weather; beautiful clouds or mist effects, or the long glories of the sunlight on the sea. The occasion often seemed to move his brain to some crystallization of the theme."

"When I was going with my mother to look at the house at Farringford in 1853, he described an incident seen as they crossed the Solent, One dark heron flew over the sea, backed by a daffodil sky.'

"Again the line, made on the beach at Freshwater :

"The shriek of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave.'

"Then again the song in 'The Princess,' 'Blow, Bugle, Blow,' came to him at his visit to Killarney in 1850, hearing the echoes among the mountains.

"Perhaps the most touching of these gleanings from nature was the origin of 'Crossing the Bar.' It is peculiarly personal and touching, for it was just after an illness when he had been near death. It was written in October of his eighty-first year. We had traveled that day from Aldworth. Something had struck him during the crossing of the Solent, and in his mind he had worked it all out. After dinner that evening he showed me the poem all written out. I said to him: That is the crown of your life's work.' He answered: 'It came in a moment.'

"He explained the pilot as 'that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.'” "Was his work at all intermittent ?" I

asked. "Did he put it aside and return to it from time to time ?"

"Of course all long poems, like all other works, require time. Some of them very much time. As I dare say you know, 'In Memoriam' took a long time about seventeen years. But I take it that you mean shorter works that may have been accomplished without serious delays."

"That is so."

"With those, when once my father had conceived the idea, the subject possessed him. It was always with him while waking and, I dare say, while sleeping, too - for I believe, as he did, in unconscious cerebration."

"Used he to work after lunch ?" I asked. "After dinner he would have a pipe by himself. Sometimes he would read a novel in the evening, or read aloud to my mother, thus tranquilizing himself for his work later. When he smoked at night I think he would let his thoughts run; he would do the thinking-over part of his work.”

Ward. In the explanatory introductions which Mrs. Humphry Ward is writing for the complete edition of her works, she does not hesitate to admit that certain of her characters are drawn from real life, but she insists upon a proper understanding of the exact sense in which this is true. Because the "Miss Bretherton" of her first novel was suggested by the career of Mary Anderson, it does not follow that all that is said of the former is true of the latter. Mrs. Ward's novels contain no portraits and no history, but they abound in characters suggested by people whom she has known, in incidents and reminiscences of real life. The scenery of "Robert Elsmere," for instance, combines Westmoreland, which Mrs. Ward knew in her childhood, with the Oxford of her girlhood and early married life, and the Surrey, where many summers were spent.

CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS.

"Mr. Dooley" on the Magazines. "Well, sir," said Mr. Dooley, "I wonder how much it costs to have a pome or a story printed

in wan iv these pop-lar magazines along. with all th' good advertisin'? I suppose it. comes high. Th' fellows that runs thim magazines must be growin' rich out iv th potes an' novelists. But I think they're goin' too far in their greed f'r goold. There must be a limit to their avarice. I don't object, mind ye, to their makin' a fair profit out iv their business iv 'idjacatin'' people where to get th' best breakfast food or th most sparklin' hair dye, or what kind iv revolver to shoot thimselves with. That's all right. But what I object to is whin I pay ten or fifteen cents f'r a magazine expectin❜ to spind me avenin' improvin' me mind with th' latest thoughts in advertisin', to find more thin a quarther iv th' whole book devoted to lithrachoor.

"It ain't fair. It's a kind iv a confidence game they play on their readers. I don't want them to be philanthropists, mind ye. They've got to make a livin'. But there ought to be some place iv stoppin' half way. Th' first thing ye know there won't be as many pages in advertisin' as there are iv lithrachoor. Then people will stop readin' magazines. A man don't want to dodge around through almost impenetrable pomes an' reform articles to find a pair iv suspinders or a shavin' soap. Another thing, th' magazines ought to be compelled to mark all lithrachoor plainly so that the reader can't be deceived. They ought to put two stars on th' end iv it, or mark it 'Reading Matther,' or print a line at th bottom: Persons answerin' this pome are requested to mention Nobody.' As it is now, many iv these articles will fool nine men out iv ten. Ye pick up a magazine an' ye see something that looks like an' advertisement. It is almost as well printed anʼ illusthrated. On'y an expert cud tell th' diff'rence at th' first glance. But whin ye get to th' end ye find to ye'er disgust that ye've been wasting ye'er time reading' a wurruk iv fiction. It's very annoyin'.

"Still there are some magazines that respect th' best thraditions iv th' profession. They keep lithrachoor in its proper bounds. It is not allowed to encroach on th' advertisin' space. Both are in their proper pro