The Authors' Clipping Bureau makes a specialty of supplying to authors about his writings, but also gaining real benefit Horsford's Acid Phosphate. from the criticisms that are made. The Authors' A most excellent and agreeable tonic and appe- DR. EPHRAIM BATEMAN, Cedarville, N. J., Personal Notices and Book but in my own individual case, and consider it under all circum. Reviews the Bureau is enabled to do thorough work, and The service which the Bureau offers is to Five Dollars a Hundred Clip- pings. This fee of Five Dollars must be paid in ad- Special arrangements can be made by which All orders for clippings should be addressed, "I have used it for several years, not only in my practice, stances one of the best nerve tonics that we possess. A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS. VOL. IV. BOSTON, JANUARY 15, 1892. It is an exceptional mind that enables an author to write at his ease amid interruptions and distractions, lets and hindrances, of a meditations of philosophy could endure the cries of children, the chatter of nurses, and the babble and coming and going in and out of serving men and women. Of Abelard himself, however, we are told that he had a rare power of abstracting himself from all outward con- cerns; that no one knew better how to be alone, though surrounded by others; and that, in fact, his senses took no note of outward things. When Cumberland was composing sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by Cowper describes himself at Weston (1791) The fourth of Dr. Chalmers' Astronomical Copyright, 1892, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved. of meeting for the first time, after a year's absence, many of his former friends and parishioners, that he penned paragraph after paragraph of a composition which, as his son-in-law and biographer, Dr. Hanna, says, bears upon it so much the aspect of high and continuous elaboration. His friend, and sometimes associate in pastoral work, — Edward Irving, on the other hand, could not write a sermon if any one was in the room with him. Chalmers appears to have been specially endowed with that faculty of concentrated attention which is commonly regarded as one of the surest marks of the highest intellect, and which Alison so much admired in Wellington — as, for instance, on the day when he lay at San Christoval, in front of the French army, hourly expecting a battle, and wrote out, in the field, a long and minute memorial on the establishment of a bank at Lisbon on the principles of the English ones. We read of Ercilla, whose epic poem, the Arancana, has admirers out of Spain, that he wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers of a campaign against barbarians, without shelter, and with nothing to write on but small scraps of waste paper, and often only leather; struggling at once against enemies and surrounding circumstances. Louis de Cormantaigne, the distinguished French engineer, composed his treatise on fortification from notes written in the trenches and on the breaches, even under the fire of the enemy. Delambré was in Paris when it was taken by the allies in 1814, and is said to have worked at his problems with perfect tranquility from eight in the morning till midnight, in the continued hearing of the cannonade. "Such selfpossession for study under that tremendous attack, and such absence of interest in the result of the great struggle, to say nothing of indifference to personal danger," is what one of his biographers confesses himself unable to understand. Small sympathy would the philosopher have had with the temperament of such a man, say, as Thomas Hood, who always wrote most at night, when all was quiet and the children were asleep. "I have a room to myself," exclaims Hood, triumphantly, in a letter describing a change of lodgings, "which will be worth £20 a year to me, for a little disconcerts my nerves." Mrs. Hood brought up the children, we learn from one of them, in a sort of Spartan style of education, on her husband's account, teaching them the virtues of silence and low voices. Washington Irving was of a less morbid temperament, and his genial nature could put up with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor small; but even in his Diary we meet with such entries as this at Bordeaux, in 1825: "Harassed by noises in the house, till I had to go out in despair, and write in Mr. Guestier's library." It was upon the Essay on American Scenery that he was then engaged. Unlike Maturin, who used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they must not speak to him, Scott allowed his children (like their mute playmates, Camp and the greyhounds) free access to his study, never considered their talk as any disturbance, let them come and go as pleased their fancy, was always ready to answer their questions, and when they, unconscious how he was engaged (writes the husband of one of them), entreated him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set them down again to their marbles or ninepins, and resume his labor as if refreshed by the interruption. There was nothing in that manly, sound, robust constitution akin to the morbid irritability of Philip in the poem: "When Philip wrote, he never seemed so well- And quickly worried." Biographers of Mistress Aphra Behn make it noteworthy of that too facile penwoman that she could write away in company and maintain the while her share in the talk. Madame Roland managed to get through her memoirs with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, though so often interrupted in the composition of them by the cries of victims in the adjoining cells, whom the executioners were dragging thence to the guillotine. Madame de Staël, "even in her most inspired compositions," according to Madame Necker de |