368 PRÆTERITA-II

tapestry. I knew exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of chapters round with what seemed to me graceful flourishes, touched them finally with my cunningest points of colour, and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast next morning, as a girl shows her sampler.

136. “Drudgery” may be a hard word for this often complacent, and entirely painless occupation; still, the best that could be said for it, was that it gave me no serious trouble; and I should think the pleasure of driving, to a good coachman, of ploughing, to a good farmer, much more of dressmaking, to an inventive and benevolent modiste, must be greatly more piquant than the most proudly ardent hours of book-writing have ever been to me, or as far as my memory ranges, to any conscientious author of merely average power. How great work is done, under what burden of sorrow, or with what expense of life, has not been told hitherto, nor is likely to be; the best of late time has been done recklessly or contemptuously. Byron would burn a canto if a friend disliked it, and Scott spoil a story to please a bookseller.

As I have come on the extremely minor question of my own work,* I may once for all complete all necessary account of it by confession of my evermore childish delight in beginning a drawing; and usually acute misery in trying to finish one. People sometimes praise me as industrious, when they count the number of printed volumes which Mr. Allen can now advertise. But the biography of the waste pencilling and passionately forsaken colouring, heaped in the dusty corners of Brantwood, if I could write it, would be far more pathetically exemplary or admonitory.

137. And as I transpose myself back through the forty years of desultory, yet careful, reading, which began in my mossy cell of Macugnaga, it becomes a yet more pertinent question to me how much life has been also wasted in

* Manner of work, I mean. How I learned the things I taught is the major, and properly, only question regarded in this history.

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