Meaning of “These crests only rise on the back of…”

On The Art of Reading, Lecture V, Project Gutenberg #16579; excerpted from Quiller-Couch’s analogy between writing practice and concentrated performance.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Immediately after linking greatness in art, literature and science with labour, Smiles rhetorically defines genius as a capacity for intense and sustained effort; it is not treated as a modern psychological finding.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The sentence immediately follows the poetry example and presents substantial work as the product of repeated effort and failure; the absolute wording is Smiles’s rhetorical generalization.

Traditional English moral associated with the fable; wording is later than the ancient Greek tradition.

Poor Richard’s Almanack; a compact maxim about cumulative effort.

Poor Richard’s Almanack; the maxim appears in Franklin’s collected Poor Richard material.