Writers.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 978, 28 November 1890, Page 9

Writers.

About forty is, according to the writer of the article on Wilkie Collins' novels in Temple Bar, the golden prime of literary labour. It was between thirty-five and fortyfive that the author of ‘ The Woman in White ’ and ‘ The Moonstone ’ wrote his four best stories. Nothing that came before or after from his pen achieved a like fame. Thackeray was thirty-seven when he completed ‘ Vanity Fair,’ and forty-one when he published * Esmond ’ perhaps the most finished of all his works. Dickens wrote * David Oopperfield ’ at thirty-nine, which was the age of George Eliot when * Adam Bede ’ first made her famous, and Anthony Trollope was forty-two when he achieved his first great success with ‘ Barehester Towers.’ Those who fall short or are in excesss of this fruitful period, however, might derive comfort, as the case may be, from the case of Chaucer, who is reputed to have written the ‘Canterbury Tales ’ between fifty-four and sixty, or of Victor Hugo, whose romances, ‘Notre Dame ’ and 1 The Toilers of the Sea ’ —each equally remarkable for boldness of invention and imaginative power—were produced, the one in his twenty-ninth, the other in his sixty-fifth year. Very aged aspirants for literary fame may draw courage from the case of Theophrastus, who is believed to have eat down to write his only great literary success, the ‘Ethical Characters,’ at the ripe age of ninety.'