Like FIAMINGO'S image, which he kept polishing till his friend exclaimed, "What perfection would you have ?"--"Alas!" exclaimed the sculptor, "the original I am labouring to come up to is in my head, but not yet in my hand." The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into our minds that sympathy with which we hang over the illusion of his pages, and become himself.

ARIOSTO wrote sixteen different ways the celebrated stanza descriptive of a tempest, as appears by his MSS.

at Ferrara; and the version he preferred was the last of the sixteen.

We know that PETRARCH made forty-four alterations of a single verse: "whether for the thought, the expression, or the harmony, it is evident that as many operations in the heart, the head, or the ear of the poet occurred," observes a man of genius, Ugo Foscolo.

Quintilian and Horace dread the over-fondness of an author for his compositions: alteration is not always improvement.