Southey's indulgence at bed-time, was a glass of hot rum punch, enriched with a little black current jelly. Byron wrote under the influence of gin and water. Coleridge took immoderate quantities of opium. Gluck, the musical composer, wrote with a bottle of Champagne beside him—Sacchini, when his wife was by his side, and his numerous cats gamboling about him.
Other authors have found relaxation in other ways. Thus Daguesseau, when he wanted relaxation from the study of jurisprudence and history, betook himself to a pair of compasses and a book of mathematics. Richelieu amused himself by playing with cats, and studying their tricks. Cowper had his tame hares. Sir Walter Scott was always attended by his favorite dogs. Professor Wilson, at this day, is famous for his terriers.
Alfieri, like Luther and Milton, found the greatest solace and inspiration in music. "Nothing," said he, "so moves my heart, and soul and intellect, and rouses my very faculties, like music—and especially the music of woman's voice. Almost all my tragedies have been conceived under the immediate emotion caused by music." Voltaire took pleasure in the Opera, (not so Thomas Carlyle, as you may have seen), and there dictated some of his most brilliant letters.
But the foibles of men of genius are endless; and would be a curious subject for some Disraeli, in a future volume of the Curiosities of Literature, to depict at length, if the subject be indeed worth the required amount of pains and labor.
[MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.][5]
BOOK XII.—Initial Chapter.
"Again," quoth my father—"Again behold us! We who greeted the commencement of your narrative, who absented ourselves in the mid course, when we could but obstruct the current of events, and jostle personages more important—we now gather round the close. Still, as the chorus to the drama, we circle round the altar with the solemn but dubious chant which prepares the audience for the completion of the appointed destinies; though still, ourselves, unaware how the skein is to be unraveled, and where the shears are to descend."
[5] Continued from the September Number.
So there they stood, the Family of Caxton—all grouping round me—all eager officiously to question—some over-anxious prematurely to criticise.