Note 492 — PART THE SECOND. (continued 11)
Reading edition
It cost Lord Lyttelton twenty years to write the Life and History of Henry II. The historian Gibbon was twelve years in completing his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and Adam Smith occupied ten years in producing his "Wealth of Nations."
A stronger instance can scarcely be quoted of the mental labour employed in the composition of a work, than what is recorded of Boileau, who occupied eleven months in writing his "Equivoque," consisting only of 346 lines, and afterwards spent three years in revising it.
Cowper sometimes wrote only five or six lines in a day.