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Updated: May 23, 2025
"He could not do task-work," he said; he wrote when the whim seized him, or when the last penny was in his pouch, or when he was actually in the spunging-house or the Fleet, migrations which occurred to him, on an average, twice a year. He could generally sell what he had actually written, but no one would engage him beforehand.
But he frequently confesses a confession which in many ways makes his plight in these years still more to be pitied an ingrained dislike to task-work of any kind; and there is no more laborious task-work than getting up and piecing together the materials for history.
"I wish," said Ulysses, "that you who speak this, and myself, were to be tried at any task-work, that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that was sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to be up by day-break, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting of food till we had finished, or that we were set to plough four acres in one day of good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest, or that we might have one wrestling-bout together, or that in our right hands a good steel-headed lance were placed, to try whose blows fell heaviest and thickest upon the adversary's head-piece.
Tradition credibly enough indicates as the causes of the revolt, that the king neglected to consult the senate and to complete its numbers; that he pronounced sentences of capital punishment and confiscation without advising with his counsellors; that he accumulated immense stores of grain in his granaries, and exacted from the burgesses military labour and task-work beyond what was due.
It is characteristic perhaps of the different genius of the sexes, that woman takes to written composition more impulsively, more intuitively, than man, letter-writing, to him a task-work, is to her a recreation. Between the age of sixteen and the date of marriage, six well-educated clever girls out of ten keep a journal; not one well-educated man in ten thousand does.
If they worked over and above that time, they were to be paid for every hour a tenth part of their daily wages, and they were also to forfeit a tenth for every hour they were absent or deficient in the work of the day. All sorts of work, however, were to be reduced, as far as it could be done by observation and estimation, to equitable task-work.
Besides service in war, other personal burdens might devolve upon the burgesses; such as the obligation of undertaking the king's commissions in peace and in war, and the task-work of tilling the king's lands or of constructing public buildings. There was no regular direct taxation, nor was there any direct regular expenditure on the part of the state.
I had previously to this arranged a system of task-work for myself, which I would strongly recommend to those who feel as I have felt, that labour, when not made absolutely obligatory by the circumstances of the hour, should never be allowed to become spasmodic. There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office.
There is especial danger, at the present day, that many of us may need to be warned like the scribe of old, wearied with his task-work, not to seek great things for ourselves.
Set to compile a biography from thirty years of "Moniteurs," the author of Waverley, like Lord Chesterfield's diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established "Eothen" as a classic.
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