mind can seek for the average of its concentrated daily effort, of six days' work in a week, and fifty-two weeks in a year. This is Sir Edward Lytton's statement; Scott's was even lower than this. The British Commission on Education has just now reported, what we have no doubt is true, that with children, at the end of three hours' faithful study, the power of acquiring is, in general, at the end for that day. That is to say, the child could learn in three hours, well used, all that it does learn in the six you keep it in school. We have no doubt this is true for children. We should put the acquiring power of men and women rather higher, perhaps; but the average of all kinds of highly concentrated mental work is probably fully stated as three hours a day.

But alas! in saying that the man who works with his brains ought, for the best work which he can do, to work on only two lines of work every day, we do but demand an impossibility, if we be speaking of modern civilization. Perhaps they work so in Arcadia, though Dr. Wordsworth makes no mention of any clergymen, lawyers, or critics whom he found there. We have heard it said that in Charleston, South Carolina, when that city and State still formed nominally a part of this planet, no man did but one thing in a day. At dinner you conversed on the day's employment. "I," said one, "went to Russell's for my umbrella, which I left there yesterday." "I," said another, "called at the news-room." "I," said a third, "made my compliments to Mr. Frazer, and saw his last picture." And the man who had done one thing in a forenoon deserved well of his country and posterity. Now that this State has joined Ceres, Pallas, Io, Bellona, Metis, and the rest of the asteroids, (the planets were all wanderers once,) and has cut off all connection with mankind, there is left no such simplicity of civilization anywhere. The man who has brains, who should start on the determination that he would every day devote himself to two subjects only, would soon be shut up by his neighbors in the same palace with those who have none. Men must devote thought, and a great deal of thought, to a very wide circle of inquiries and occupations as a single day's work goes by. One cannot be St. Bernard, or Duns Scotus, if he would, in a world which has advanced into

the nineteenth century of the enlivenment of its life. To speak only of the invention of the post-office, of which the advantages have never been so demonstrated as to leave it beyond question whether the curse it inflicts is not greater, correspondence alone is enough to destroy the ideal system of daily mental activity which we have tried to describe.

"Correspondence is the burden of modern civilization," says St. Marc Girardin. He is describing the life of luxury which the first families of Rome led in their country homes in the centuries which Gibbon calls the happiest in the history of the world. On the other hand, most men of affairs tell us today that it is personal presence only which moves men now, letters going so easily where printed circulars go of course, into the waste-basket, or more directly into the fire. Yet the world has not yet learned this truth, if it be truth, and correspondence is still one of our greatest burdens. It is a burden which precisely illustrates the danger which we have described, of cutting off one mental process to begin again on another; of leaving to dry the supposed plates of the mental battery, before we set them to work again. It is far more fatiguing to the mind to write ten letters on different subjects of importance, than to write one on the same subject of the same length as all the ten. The change involved of method, of style, of familiarity, of recollections, calls so severely on the mental power employed as to drain it to the utmost. It would, therefore, be better, unquestionably, always to answer a letter as soon as it is received, while the mind is still occupied with the subject, thus avoiding break and jar. Letter and answer would then cost only the fatigue of hand required in writing. But this would shock people's prejudices in favor of second thoughts, there being in the world a suspicion that rowen is sometimes worth more than June hay. And it would make correspondence fatally brisk. The railroads are bad enough, but how terrible life, if every letter brought its echo by return mail! The practical way for us to regain the paradise of our ancestors in these matters would seem to be, to answer our letters in the moment which received them, and then lay the answers by for a month before we posted them. One hardpressed friend suggests to us that the invention of small note

paper is the providential remedy. We have never seen any small enough to cure the disease. Another studies the Duke of Wellington's despatches, in hope of attaining brevity. Another has blanks by which a secretary furnishes uniform answers to all the people who would like his recommendation for Chief Justice, or, if they cannot be that, would be glad of a subordinate commission in the quartermaster's department. But the system of blanks goes only a very little way in relief. Another used a manifold letter-writer for his letters of affection, and sent them in triplicate to different friends. But this plan was upset when he had one returned by a wounded spirit not appreciated. Members of Congress sometimes detail their wives to write their autographs for them. Mr. Fillmore used the best plan we know, if the thing is to be done at all, in dictating to a phonographic reporter his letters. They were then written out at the reporter's leisure, signed and posted; yet the original copies of the letters were preserved in the phonographic notes. Sixty letters of average length could perhaps thus be dictated in an hour; but we should say that an hour of such work would be all the concentrated work any man ought to do in a day. The most effective man we ever knew never answered any letters at all. All that he wrote were the letters which affairs made necessary for the communication of information to his fellow-laborers. For the rest, let them come and see him, as, alas! they did. It will probably be in this way eventually that the "burden of modern civilization" will be tipped off its back into the sea.

We need not apologize for this excursus on letter-writing, for the illustration it furnishes of the difficult conditions imposed on mental effort by modern barbarism is an illustration which covers very wide ground. Correspondence is the most oppressive of a series of demands made on men of affairs which interrupt the regularity of mental effort for which any system provides. And no study of the subject is in the least adequate, which does not allude to such external demands and interruptions. They must be provided for as well as the mind's personal and immediate requisitions. If they cannot be resisted or avoided, the reply made to the requisitions of the mind itself must be adapted, as far as possible, to their rapacity.

We are not bound to travel into detail to discuss the adaptations which will be found the most successful. Every department of mental effort has to furnish its own, the tricks by which different hunted hares escape from the hounds let loose upon them in the barbarism in which we live, - the methods by which men doing their own duty meet, in contest or in submission, the invaders who ask them also to do theirs. Nor is it fair to speak as if all such invasions of a man's own plan of life ought to be avoided or evaded. In a world where our whole duty is to bear each other's burdens, it ill becomes any man of us to choose the particular way in which he will bear them, the particular yoke which he will carry.

It is evident that, if one is to shift from point to point among a multitude of important cares in such complex affairs, the maximum of working time must be reduced, even below the poor three hours which we have given as the average of daily exertion. Baron Rothschild, who may be supposed to have arranged as nicely as any man can the methods for disposing rapidly of demands made on his thought, is said to meet them thus. He stands in a central office in his place of affairs, where he can speak, if necessary, to his heads of department. Those who have personal business with him are bidden to prepare in writing what they would say; they are introduced, and give to him or read to him the memorandum. He answers, and the conversation, if any is necessary, follows, both standing. Brevity is attempted by the two expedients of a standing position and of written inquiry. How necessary this is, any clergyman will say who has known a visitor take three hours in saying he wants to be married. On the other hand, the value of personal presence is not lost, and the assistants, if necessary, are within call. Thus a hundred visitors, perhaps, are disposed of in a forenoon. Concentration could hardly go farther. We have described these details to say that it would evidently be impossible to work in that way, even up to our poor little average of three hours daily. The more varied the subjects of work so highly concentrated, the shorter must its period necessarily be.

Of the palliatives possible for the relief of the pressure of such work as falls on the student or other literary workman, VOL. LXXII. - 5TH S. VOL. X. NO. I.

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we do not speak in detail, because every condition of mental activity must of necessity provide its own. The transferring of the mechanical operation of writing, by those who have much work of composition, to the hand of an amanuensis, is the only one of these expedients which we are to speak of here. It does not seem well to use this relief to the full, as did an alderman of one of our chief cities, who, confident that he could always hire a reader to read for him, and a clerk to write for him, neglected to acquire for himself the two accomplishments of writing and reading. There are purposes of both accomplishments, which cannot be attained by proxies. So this officer found, when, in an attempt to escape from the arrest which threatened him, because his various writings were so inconsistent with each other, he arrived at the fork of two roads, looked sadly at the finger-post, whose guidance was useless to him because he was without his reader, and so returned to meet the sheriff, and to acknowledge that there were occasions when one must do his own reading, as he had found before by the state of his bank-books that he had better have done some of his own writing. Sentimental or exacting correspondents, too, are apt to expect that a letter shall be in the handwriting of the author. To meet this difficulty, the English offices have clerks in readiness, who, in three days after a change of ministry, are able to write in the handwriting of the new officials, and to execute for them their "private and confidential memoranda." Without going into such niceties, it may be said that any duty so mechanical as the mere forming of letters into words is probably better done by a young person whose whole attention is turned to it, than it can be by the person who is also engaged in determining what the words shall be. We have no doubt, therefore, that, on the whole, the employment of an amanuensis improves the quality of the work performed. It is very true, that, when the experiment of dictating is first tried, the luxury of the ease it gives is apt to be so great, that it tends to looseness and verbosity of style; for there is no better check on sesquipedalianism than the necessity of writing down one's sesquipedalian words for one's self. And in the beginning, if one is lying on a sofa, and using another's hand, he puts in his long words and long