He wrote the 'Epoques de
la Nature' not fewer than eleven times before he was satisfied with
it; although he had thought over the work about fifty years. He
was a thorough man of business, most orderly in everything; and he
was accustomed to say that genius without order lost three-fourths
of its power. His great success as a writer was the result mainly
of his painstaking labour and diligent application. "Buffon,"
observed Madame Necker, "strongly persuaded that genius is the
result of a profound attention directed to a particular subject,
said that he was thoroughly wearied out when composing his first
writings, but compelled himself to return to them and go over them
carefully again, even when he thought he had already brought them
to a certain degree of perfection; and that at length he found
pleasure instead of weariness in this long and elaborate
correction." It ought also to be added that Buffon wrote and
published all his great works while afflicted by one of the most
painful diseases to which the human frame is subject.
Literary life affords abundant illustrations of the same power of
perseverance; and perhaps no career is more instructive, viewed in
this light, than that of Sir Walter Scott. His admirable working
qualities were trained in a lawyer's office, where he pursued for
many years a sort of drudgery scarcely above that of a copying
clerk.
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