"If you had been behind the curtains, you would have said to yourself, how can all this gossip and twaddle find a place in the same head with certain ideas! And in truth I was charming, and played the fool to a marvel."[199] In the midst of distractions great and small, was an indomitable industry.

"I tell you," he wrote, "and I tell all men, when you are ill at ease with yourself, instantly set about some good work.

In busying myself to soothe the trouble of another, I forget my own." He was assiduous in teaching his daughter, though he complained that her mother crushed out in a day what it had taken him a month to implant.

The booksellers found him the most cheerful and strenuous bondsman that ever booksellers had.

He would pass a whole month without a day's break, working ten hours every day at the revision of proof-sheets.