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The Authors' Clipping Bureau

makes a specialty of supplying to authors
notices and reviews of their books from news-
papers and magazines. By securing its aid an
author may have brought to his attention at
small expense every printed reference to his
literary work, thus not only gratifying his natu-
ral curiosity to see what the critics have to say

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about his writings, but also gaining real benefit Horsford's Acid Phosphate.

from the criticisms that are made. The Authors'
Clipping Bureau employs trained readers te
examine the literary departments of all the
newspapers and magazines, and no item of in-
terest to patrons is allowed to escape their
notice. By devoting itself to this specialty of
supplying

A most excellent and agreeable tonic and appe-
tizer. It nourishes and invigorates the tired brain
and body, imparts renewed energy and vitality,
and enlivens the functions.

DR. EPHRAIM BATEMAN, Cedarville, N. J.,

says:-

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
to collect from thousands of papers the scat-
tered notices which an author relying upon his
own unaided efforts, or upon the courtesy of
his publishers, could never hope to see.

The service which the Bureau offers is to
supply any author with every printed notice of
his literary work, or personal reference to him-
self. The clippings will show the name and date
of the publication from which they are taken,
and no duplicates will be sent, unless by special
request. The charge for the service will be

Five Dollars a Hundred Clip-

pings.

This fee of Five Dollars must be paid in ad-
vance, and covers all expenses until one hun-
dred clippings have been mailed. After that
the charge will be five cents a clipping, payable
when bills are rendered. The advance deposit
of Five Dollars for the first hundred clippings
is required in every case.

Special arrangements can be made by which
writers will be supplied on the same terms with
clippings on any subject in which they may be
interested, or which they may be investigating
in the course of their literary work. The whole
vast wealth of periodical literature, containing the
latest information upon every conceivable sub-
ject, is thus opened to writers, who can secure
in this way material that cannot be obtained
from cyclopædias and other works of reference.

All orders for clippings should be addressed,
and drafts and money-orders made payable, to

THE AUTHORS' CLIPPING BUREAU,

186 WASHINGTON ST., Room 11,

BOSTON, MASS,

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THE AUTHOR:

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS.

VOL. IV.

BOSTON, JANUARY 15, 1892.

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sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by
the noise of his children at play beside him.
The literary habits of Lord Hailes, as Mr.
Robert Chambers remarks, were hardly such
as would have been expected from his extreme
nicety of diction: it was in no secluded sanc-
tum, or "den," that he composed, but by the
"parlour fireside," with wife and bairns within
very present sight and sound.

Cowper describes himself at Weston (1791)
as working in a study exposed to all manner of
inroads, and in no way disconcerted by the
coming and going of servants, or other inci-
dental and inevitable impediments. A year or
two later he writes from the same spot,
"amidst a chaos of interruptions," including
Hayley spouting Greek, and Mrs. Unwin talk-
ing sometimes to them, sometimes to herself.
Francis Horner relates a visit he and a friend
paid to Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey, one
spacious room in which, a tapestried chamber,
the utilitarian philosopher had utilized for what
he called his "scribbling shop " two or three
tables being set out, covered with white nap-
kins, on which were placed music desks with
manuscripts; and here the visitors were al-
lowed to be "present at the mysteries, for he
went on as if we had not been with him.”

The fourth of Dr. Chalmers' Astronomical
Discourses was penned in a small pocket-book,
in a strange apartment, where he was liable
every moment to interruption; for it was at the
manse of Balmerino, disappointed in not find-
ing the minister at home, and having a couple
of hours to spare, — and in a drawing-room at
the manse of Kilmany, with all the excitement

Copyright, 1892, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved.

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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-
Was startled even if a cinder fell,

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

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