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 ; and the loveliest of Lord Surrey's verses were written in the same place, under the same circumstances. Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the World" was composed in the Tower. George Buchanan executed his brilliant Latin version of the Psalms while incarcerated in Portugal. "Fleta," one of the most valuable of our early law works, took its name from the fact of its having been compiled by its author in the Fleet Prison. Boethius' "Consolations of Philosophy," De Foe's "Review" and "Hymn to the Pillory," Voltaire's "Henriade," Howel's "Familiar Letters" — to which we have recently directed attention — Dr. Dodd's "Prison Thoughts," Grotius' "Commentary on St. Matthew," and the amusing "Adventures of Dr. Syntax," all these were produced in the gloomy cells of a common prison. Tasso wrote some of the loveliest of his sonnets in a mad-house, and Christopher Smart his "Song to David" — one of the most eloquent sacred lyrics in our language — while undergoing confinement in a similar place. Poor Nathaniel Lee, the dramatist, is said to have revolved some of his tragedies in lucid intervals within the walls of a lunatic asylum. Plautus fabricated some of his comedies in a bakehouse. The great Descartes, Berni, the Italian poet, and Boyse, the once well-known author of "The Deity," usually wrote while lying in bed. Hooker meditated his "Ecclesiastical Polity" while rocking the cradle of his child; and Richardson slowly elaborated his romances among the compositors of his printing-office. Byron composed the greater part of "Lara" while engaged at his toilet-table, and his "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre" in a stage-coach. Moore's gorgeous Eastern romance, "Lalla Rookh," was written in a cottage blocked up with snow, with an English winter roaring round it. Burns dreamed one of his lyrics, and wrote it down just as it came to him in his sleep. Tartini's "Devil's Sonata" was another inspiration from Morpheus; and so also was Coleridge's "Kubla Khan."

Such were the extraordinary circumstances attending the composition of works which have amused and instructed thousands of people; such have been some of the methods, and such some of the habits of authors. Various and unintelligible often are the forms in which human genius will reveal itself; but quite as various, and perhaps quite as unintelligible, at first sight, are the ways in which it has surmounted the obstacles which opposed it, asserted its claims, and effected its development.

 

 From the Spectator.

begin to hate nations just as they begin to hate individuals, but the progress of their hatred is so different as to deserve a moment's study. A man hates another usually for some reason, producible, at all events, to his own mind, either because he has suffered from his enemy, or because he is in his way, or because he is insolent towards him, or because, for some reason not quite clear even to himself, he entertains a secret fear of his adversary's possible action. There are, no doubt, what we may call sympathetic hatreds, aversions springing from no known or recognized cause, born instantly on contact, and really produced by a perceived conflict of natures, temperaments, or sometimes aspirations. It is the hatred of a horse for a camel, of an ichneumon for a snake, of a Chinaman for a negro, and inexplicable by mere reasoning. Such cases do occur, just as love at first sight does occur, but they are rare, and as a rule a hater requires provocation from the object of his hatred, though, of course, the provocation may occasionally be found merely in the fact of the provokers existence. Kings have hated their heirs very bitterly for no better reason than that, and hatred to a man who stands between yourself and a pleasant life, though he may be standing there quite innocently, is among the commonest of social phenomena. The hatred, however, commonly begins with a reason, is exasperated by a series of actual or supposed events, and then, in Christian society and in our modern world, receives a check. We cannot, indeed, quite agree with Bulwer, who maintained in one of his novels that hatred was an extinct motor, for we see murders committed every day for which we can perceive no other motive, and hear perpetually of social quarrels in which hatred has at last moved two men to violent and hostile action, but it is true, we think, that modern hatred is subject to checks. Not only is the hater subject to those influences from the variety and complexity of modern life of which Bulwer speaks, from the number of the interests which necessarily press upon his mind and prevent him