Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/53

THE INBORN TALENT

have you spent the first thirty or forty years of your life face to face with hard realities, in the activities of business or of travel and adventure—as a soldier of fortune rather than man of letters? It does not follow that in the one case you have the inborn literary instinct and that in the other you have not. Ruskin at the age of five had already entered upon his apprenticeship. Before he had learned to write, he had taught himself a makeshift method of vertical printing with a pencil, and had undertaken a story in three-volume form, the name of which escapes the memory, and really does not matter. The significant thing about it is that this precocious child of five was already so saturated with the atmosphere of books, so familiar with their form and make-up, that with the imitative fidelity of his age, he added to his own work a carefully compiled page of errata. Sir Walter Besant, after hav-

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