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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Letter Book
+       Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2010 [EBook #31072]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LETTER BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note                                         |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in        |
+  | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of   |
+  | this document.                                             |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Text printed using the Greek alphabet in the original book |
+  | is shown as follows: [Greek: logos].                       |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Superscript text in the original book is shown as follows: |
+  | w^ch                                                       |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER BOOK
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER BOOK
+
+SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
+ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF
+LETTER-WRITING
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+
+LONDON
+G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE AND CO.
+1922
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When my publishers were good enough to propose that I should undertake
+this book, they were also good enough to suggest that the Introduction
+should be of a character somewhat different from that of a
+school-anthology, and should attempt to deal with the Art of
+Letter-writing, and the nature of the Letter, as such. I formed a plan
+accordingly, by which the letters, and their separate Prefatory Notes,
+might be as it were illustrations to the Introduction, which was
+intended in turn to be a guide to them. Having done this with a proper
+_Pourvu que Dieu lui prête vie_ referring to both book and author, I
+thought it well to look up next what had been done in the way before me,
+at least to the extent of what the London Library could provide me in
+circumstances of enforced abstinence from the Museum and from "Bodley."
+From its catalogue I selected a curious eighteenth-century _Art of
+Letter Writing_, and four nineteenth and earliest twentieth century
+books--Roberts's _History of Letter Writing_ (1843) with Pickering's
+ever-beloved title-page and his beautiful clear print; the _Littérature
+Epistolaire_ of Barbey d'Aurevilly--a critic never to be neglected
+though always to be consulted with eyes wide open and brain alert;
+finally, two Essays in Dr. Jessopp's _Studies by a Recluse_ and in the
+_Men and Letters_ of Mr. Herbert Paul, once a very frequent associate of
+mine. The title of the first mentioned book speaks it pretty
+thoroughly. "The Art of Letter Writing: Divided into Two Parts. The
+First: Containing Rules and Directions for writing letters on all sorts
+of subjects [_this line as well as several others is Rubricked_] with a
+variety of examples equally elegant and instructive. The Second: a
+Collection of Letters on the Most interesting occasions of life in which
+are inserted--The proper method of Addressing Persons of all ranks; some
+necessary orthographical directions, the right forms of message for
+cards; and thoughts upon a multiplicity of subjects; the whole composed
+upon an entirely new plan--chiefly calculated for the instruction of
+youth, but may be [_sic_] of singular service to Gentlemen, Ladies and
+all others who are desirous to attain the true style and manner of a
+polite epistolary intercourse." May our own little book have no worse
+fortune! Mr. Roberts's avowedly restricts itself to the fifth century as
+a _terminus ad quem_, though it professes to start "from the earliest
+times," and its seven hundred pages deal very honestly and fully with
+their subjects. The essays of Dr. Jessopp and Mr. Paul are of course
+merely Essays, of a score or two of pages: though the first is pretty
+wide in its scope. There would be nothing but good to be said of either,
+if both had not been, not perhaps blasphemous but parsimonious of
+praise, towards "Our Lady of the Rocks." It cannot be too often or too
+solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sévigné as a
+letter-writer is not crotchet or fashion or affectation--is no result of
+merely taking authority on trust. The more one reads her, and the more
+one reads others, the more convinced should one be of her absolute
+non-pareility in almost every kind of genuine letter (as apart from
+letters that are really pamphlets or speeches or sermons) except pure
+love-letters, of which we have none from her. As for _Littérature
+Epistolaire_, it is a collection of some two dozen reviews of various
+modern reprints of letters by distinguished writers--mostly but not all
+French. The author has throughout used the letters he is considering
+almost wholly as tell-tales of character, not as examples of art: and
+therefore he does not, except in possible glances, require further
+attention, though the book is full of interesting things. Its judgment
+of one of our greatest, and one of the greatest of all,
+letter-writers--Horace Walpole--is too severe, but not, like Macaulay's,
+superficially insistent on superficial defects, and ought not to be
+neglected by anyone who studies the subject.
+
+If, however, there was no need to rely on any of these books, they did
+nothing to hinder in the peculiar way in which I had feared some
+hindrance. For it is a nuisance to find that somebody else has done
+something in the precise way in which you have planned doing it. I have
+not yet encountered that nuisance here. Dr. Jessopp's general plan is
+most like mine--indeed some similarity was unavoidable: but the two are
+not identical, and I had planned mine before I knew anything about his.
+
+So with this prelude let us go to business, only premising further that
+the object, unlike that of the anonymous Augustan, is not to "give rules
+and instructions for writing good letters," except in the way (which far
+excels all rules and instructions) of showing how good letters have been
+written. Let us also modestly trust that the collection may deal with
+some "interesting occasions of life" and contain "thoughts on a [fair]
+multiplicity of subjects." Having been, as above observed, unable during
+the composition of this book to visit London or Oxford, I have had to
+rely occasionally on friendly assistance. I owe particular thanks (as
+indeed I have owed them at almost any time these forty years) to the
+Rev. William Hunt, D.Litt., Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford:
+and I am also indebted to Miss Elsie Hitchcock for some kind aid at the
+Museum given me through the intermediation of Professor Ker.
+
+Besides the thanks given to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, Mr. Kipling and Dr.
+Williamson in the text in reference to certain new or almost new
+letters, we owe very sincere gratitude for permission to reprint the
+following important matters:
+
+     _His Honour Judge Parry._ Two letters from "Letters from
+     Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple."
+
+     _Messrs. Douglas & Foulis._ A letter to Joanna Baillie, from
+     "Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott."
+
+     _Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co._ Two letters from Mrs.
+     Carlyle's "Letters and Memorials," and one letter from Sir
+     G. O. Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay."
+
+     _Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._ Three letters from "The
+     Letters of Charles Dickens"; one letter by FitzGerald and
+     one by Thomas Carlyle, from "Letters and Literary Remains of
+     Edward FitzGerald"; one letter from "Charles Kingsley: his
+     Letters and Memories of his Life"; and two extracts from
+     "Further Records, 1848-1883," by Frances Anne Kemble.
+
+     _Mr. John Murray._ One letter from "The Letters of Elizabeth
+     Barrett Browning."
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
+
+1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH,
+_October, 1921_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+PREFACE                                                      v
+
+
+INTRODUCTION ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER-WRITING        1
+
+    I. Ancient History. II. Letters in English--before
+    1700. III. The Eighteenth Century. IV. Nineteenth
+    Century Letters--Early. V. Nineteenth
+    Century Letters--Later. VI. Some Special Kinds
+    of Letter. VII. Conclusion.
+
+
+APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION:
+
+    GREEK LETTERS--SYNESIUS                                100
+
+        (i)  To his Brother--Preparations to meet Raiders.
+        (ii) To Hypatia--Longing but unable to come
+             to her.
+
+    LATIN LETTERS--PLINY                                   102
+
+        Accepts a Brief for a Lady.
+
+    LETTERS OF THE "DARK" AGES--SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS       105
+
+        The exploits of Ecdicius.
+
+    EARLY MEDIAEVAL (TWELFTH CENTURY) LETTER               108
+
+        Duchess of Burgundy to King Louis VII.--Matchmaking.
+
+ENGLISH LETTERS
+
+THE "PASTON" LETTERS                                       111
+
+    1. A Channel Fight.
+    2. Margery is Willing.
+
+ROGER ASCHAM                                               116
+
+    3. "Up the Rhine."
+    4. Nostalgia for Cambridge.
+
+LADY MARY SIDNEY                                           122
+
+    5. Have you no room at Court?
+
+GEORGE CLIFFORD, EARL OF CUMBERLAND                        125
+
+    6. A Death-bed letter.
+
+JOHN DONNE                                                 129
+
+    7-10. Letters to Magdalen Lady Herbert.
+
+JAMES HOWELL                                               135
+
+    11. "Long Melford for Ever."
+    12. The White Bird.
+
+JOHN EVELYN                                                139
+
+    13. How to take care of ears, eyes and brains.
+
+DOROTHY OSBORNE                                            146
+
+    14. A discourse of Flying, and several other things.
+    15. Some testimonies of kindness.
+
+JONATHAN SWIFT                                             154
+
+    16. Letter-hunger.
+
+LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU                                  159
+
+    17. Directions for running away with her.
+
+PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD               164
+
+    18. Some manners that make a gentleman.
+
+GEORGE BALLARD                                             173
+
+    19. The wickedness of Reviewers.
+
+THOMAS GRAY                                                180
+
+    20. Romanities and Plain English.
+    21. Kent, Rousseau, Lord Chatham, etc.
+
+HORACE WALPOLE (AND W. M. THACKERAY)                       187
+
+    22. What Horace wrote.
+    23. What Horace might have written.
+
+TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT                                     195
+
+    24. Of Johnson, and Johnson's Frank--To Wilkes.
+
+WILLIAM COWPER                                             197
+
+    25. About a Greenhouse.
+
+SYDNEY SMITH                                               201
+
+    26. Vegetation, stagnation, and assassination.
+    27. His "hotel." Hasty judgments deprecated.
+
+SIR WALTER SCOTT                                           206
+
+    28. Authors and Morals.
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE                                    212
+
+    29. From Spinosa to Go_b_win through things in general.
+
+ROBERT SOUTHEY                                             217
+
+    30-33. The _Lingo Grande_.
+
+CHARLES LAMB                                               221
+
+    34. A Sigh for Solitude.
+
+GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON                                  228
+
+    35. Of Pictures, and Sepulture, and his Daughters.
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY                                       233
+
+    36. Of Pictures only.
+
+JOHN KEATS                                                 239
+
+    37. A Voyage, and the _Quarterly_ and Charmian.
+
+THE CARLYLES                                               244
+
+    38. Thomas on _Latrappism_.
+    39. Jane Welsh on her Travels.
+    40. Jane Welsh on the blessings of Photography.
+
+THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY                                  253
+
+    41. Outfits, and Election Dinners. Miss Berry and
+          Lady Holland.
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES                                      258
+
+    42. Stage-coach tricks, and stage-play ghosts.
+
+ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING                                 263
+
+    43. An extended Honey-moon.
+
+EDWARD FITZGERALD                                          270
+
+    44. Of Bath, and Oxford, and some Immortals.
+
+FRANCIS ANNE KEMBLE                                        275
+
+    45. A Ghost in Flannel.
+    46. Bakespearism.
+
+WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY                                279
+
+    47. As himself.
+    48. In character.
+
+CHARLES DICKENS                                            286
+
+    49. Straight dealing with the personages of _Nicholas
+          Nickleby_.
+    50. Advice to an Innocent in London.
+    51. Mr. and Mrs. Harris.
+
+CHARLES KINGSLEY                                           292
+
+    52. _Tom Brown's Schooldays_; Pike fishing; and a
+          pretty thing with Garth's.
+
+JOHN RUSKIN                                                296
+
+    53. The Servant question.
+
+ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON                             303
+
+    54. John Gibson Lockhart, and an Umbrella.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER
+WRITING
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ANCIENT HISTORY
+
+
+On letter-writing, as on most things that can themselves be written and
+talked about, there are current many _clichés_--stock and banal sayings
+that express, or have at some time expressed, a certain amount of truth.
+The most familiar of these for a good many years past has been that the
+penny post has killed it. Whether revival of the twopenny has caused it
+to exhibit any kind of corresponding resurrectionary symptoms is a
+matter which cannot yet be pronounced upon. But it may be possible to
+avoid these _clichés_, or at any rate to make no more than necessary
+glances at them, in composing this little paper, which aims at being a
+discussion of the Letter as a branch of Literature, no less than an
+introduction to the specimens of the kind which follow.
+
+If, according to a famous dictum, "Everything has been said," it follows
+that every definition must have been already made. Therefore, no doubt,
+somebody has, or many bodies have, before now defined or at least
+described the Letter as that kind of communication of thought or fact to
+another person which most immediately succeeds the oral, and supplies
+the claims of absence. You want to tell somebody something; but he or
+she is not, as they used to say "by," or perhaps there are circumstances
+(and circum_standers_) which or who make speech undesirable; so you
+"write." At first no doubt, you used signs or symbols like the feather
+with which Wildrake let Cromwell's advent be known in _Woodstock_--a
+most ingenious device for which, by the way, the recipients were scantly
+grateful. But when reading and writing came by nature, you availed
+yourself of these Nature's gifts, not always, it is to be feared,
+regarding the interconnection of the two sufficiently. There is probably
+more than one person living who has received a reply beginning "Dear
+So-and-So, Thanks for your interesting and _partially legible_ epistle,"
+or words to that effect. But that is a part of the matter which lies
+outside our range.
+
+On the probable general fact, however, some observations may be less
+frivolously based. If this were a sentimental age, as some ages in the
+past have been, one might assume that, as the first portrait is supposed
+to have been a silhouette of the present beloved, drawn on her shadow
+with a charcoaled stick, so the same, or another implement may have
+served (on what substitute for paper anybody pleases) to communicate
+with her when absent. But the silliness of this age--though far be it
+from us to dispute its possession of so prevailing a quality--does not
+take the form--at least _this_ form--of sentiment.
+
+[Sidenote: THE BEGINNINGS]
+
+There is, moreover, nothing silly or sentimental, though of course there
+is something that may be controverted, in saying that except for purely
+"business" purposes (which are as such alien from Art and have nothing
+to do with any but a part, and a rather sophisticated part, of Nature)
+the less the letter-writer forgets that he is merely substituting pen
+for tongue the better. Of course, the instruments and the circumstances
+being different, the methods and canons of the proceedings will be
+different too. In the letter there is no interlocutor; and there is no
+possibility of what we may call accompanying it with personal
+illustrations[1] and demonstrations, if necessary or agreeable. But
+still it may be laid down, with some confidence, that the more the
+spoken word is heard in a letter the better, and the less that word is
+heard--the more it gives way to "book"-talk--the worse. Indeed this is
+not likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almost infinite
+possibilities of differences in personal opinion as to what constitutes
+the desirable mixture of variation and similarity between a conversation
+and a letter. Let us, before discussing this or saying anything more
+about the principles, say something about the history of this, at best
+so delightful, at worst so undelightful art. For if History, in the
+transferred sense of particular books called "histories," is rather apt
+to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense will ever
+lead us to truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The Present is
+turning to Past even as we are trying to know it. Only the Past itself
+abides our knowledge.
+
+[Sidenote: BIBLICAL EXAMPLES]
+
+Of the oldest existing examples of epistolary correspondence, except
+those contained in the Bible, the present writer knows little or
+nothing. For, except a vanished smattering of Hebrew, he "has" no
+Oriental tongue; he has never been much addicted to reading
+translations, and even if he had been so has had little occasion to draw
+him to such studies, and much to draw him away from them. There
+certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens of the more passionate
+letter writing in ancient if not exactly pre-Christian Chinese, and
+probably in other tongues--but it is ill talking of what one does not
+know. In the Scriptures themselves letters do not come early, and the
+"token" period probably lasted long. Isaac does not even send a token
+with Jacob to validate his suit for a daughter of Laban. But one would
+have enjoyed a letter from Ishmael to his half-brother, when his
+daughter was married to Esau, who was so much more like a son of Ishmael
+himself than of the amiable husband of Rebekah. She, by the way, had
+herself been fetched in an equally unlettered transaction. It would of
+course be impossible, and might be regarded as improper, to devote much
+space here to the sacred epistolographers. But one may wonder whether
+many people have appreciated the humour of the two epistles of the great
+King Ahasuerus-Artaxerxes, the first commanding and the second
+countermanding the massacre of the Jews--epistles contained in the
+Septuagint "Rest of the Book of Esther" (see our Apocrypha), instead of
+the mere dry summaries which had sufficed for "the Hebrew and the
+Chaldee." The exact authenticity of these fuller texts is a matter of no
+importance, but their substance, whether it was the work of a Persian
+civil servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever
+it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and
+such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in
+the first letter of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was
+approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity" with "the
+wicked wretch Aman--a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and
+cunning"--the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the
+respective key-notes--is worthy of any one of the best ironists from
+Aristophanes to the late Mr. Traill.
+
+Between these two extremes of the Pentateuch and the Apocrypha there is,
+as has been remarked by divers commentators, not much about letters in
+the Bible. It is not auspicious that among the exceptions come David's
+letter commanding the betrayal of Uriah, and a little later Jezebel's
+similar prescription for the judicial murder of Naboth. There is,
+however, some hint of that curious attractiveness which some have seen
+in "the King's daughter all glorious within--" and without (as the
+Higher Criticism interprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland way with
+which she herself stipulates that the false witnesses shall be "sons of
+Belial."
+
+There is a book (once much utilised as a school prize) entitled _The
+History of Inventions_. I do not know whether there is a "Dictionary of
+Attributed Inventors." If there were it would contain some queer
+examples. One of the queerest is fathered (for we only have it at second
+hand) on Hellanicus, a Greek writer of respectable antiquity--the
+Peloponnesian war-time--and respectable repute for book-making in
+history, chronology, etc. It attributes the invention of letters--_i.e._
+"epistolary correspondence"--to Atossa--not Mr. Matthew Arnold's Persian
+cat but--the Persian Queen, daughter of Cyrus, wife of Cambyses and
+Darius, mother of Xerxes, and in more than her queenly status a sister
+to Jezebel. Atossa had not a wholly amiable reputation, but she was
+assuredly no fool: and if, to borrow a famous phrase, it had been
+necessary to invent letters, there is no known reason why she might not
+have done it. But it is perfectly certain that she did not, and no one
+who combines, as all true scholars should endeavour to combine, an
+unquenchable curiosity to know what can be known and is worth knowing
+with a placid resignation to ignorance of what cannot be known and would
+not be worth knowing--need in the least regret the fact that we do not
+know who did.
+
+There are said to be Egyptian letters of immense antiquity and high
+development; but once more, I do not profess direct knowledge of them,
+and once more I hold that of what a man does not possess direct
+knowledge, of that he should not write. Besides, for practical purposes,
+all our literature begins with Greek: so to Greek let us turn. We have a
+fair bulk of letters in that language. Hercher's _Epistolographi Graeci_
+is a big volume, and would not be a small one, if you cut out the Latin
+translations. But it is unfortunate that nearly the whole, like the
+majority of later Greek literature, is the work of that special class
+called rhetoricians--a class for which, though our term "book-makers"
+may be a little too derogatory, "men of letters" is rarely (it is
+sometimes) applicable, as we use it when we mean to be complimentary.
+These letters are still close to "speech," thus meeting in a fashion our
+initial requirement, but they are close to the speech of the
+"orator"--of the sophisticated speaker to the public--not to that of
+genuine conversation. In fact in some cases it would require only the
+very slightest change to make those exercitations of the rhetors which
+are not called "epistles" definite letters in form, while some of the
+best known and characteristic of their works are so entitled.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RHETORICIANS]
+
+It was unfortunate for the Greeks, as it would seem, and for us more
+certainly, that letter-writing was so much affected by these
+"rhetoricians." This curious class of persons has perhaps been too much
+abused: and there is no doubt that very great writers came out of
+them--to mention one only in each division--Lucian among the extremely
+profane, and St. Augustine among the greatest and most intellectual of
+divines. But though their habitual defects are to be found abundantly
+enough in modern society, these defects are, with us, as a rule
+distributed among different classes; while anciently they were united in
+this one. We have our journalists, our book-makers (literary, not
+sporting), our platform and parliamentary palaverers, our popular
+entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and
+collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician
+of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined
+the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one
+division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above
+all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification
+and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. In particular he
+had a mania in his more serious moods for defining and sub-defining
+things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub-definitions.
+Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who (or a false namesake of his)
+has left us a capital _general_ remark (to be given presently) on
+letter-writing, elaborately divides its kinds, with prescriptions for
+writing each, into "friendly," "commendatory," "reproving,"
+"objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing,"
+"threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory," "persuasive," "begging,"
+"questioning," "answering," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing,"
+"defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the
+neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has attributed
+to him, a list of nearly double the length, including most of those
+given above and adding many. Of these last, "love-letters" is the most
+important, and "mixed" the _canniest_, for it practically lets in
+everything.
+
+This way, of course, except for purely business purposes--where
+established forms save time, trouble and possible litigation--no
+possible good lies; and indeed the impossibility thereof is clearly
+enough indicated in the above-glanced-at general remark of Demetrius (or
+whoever it was) himself. In fact the principle of this remark and its
+context in the work called "Of Interpretation," which it is more usual
+now to call, perhaps a little rashly, "Of Style," is so different from
+the catalogue of types that they can hardly come from the same author.
+"You _can_ from this, as well as from all other kinds of writing,
+discern the character of the writer; indeed from none other can you
+discern it so well." Those who know a little of the history of Criticism
+will see how this anticipates the most famous and best definitions of
+Style itself, as being "the very man," and they may perhaps also think
+worthy of notice another passage in the same context where the author
+finds fault with a rather "fine" piece of an epistle as "not the way a
+man would talk to his friend," and even goes on to use the most familiar
+Greek word for talking--[Greek: lalein]--in the same connection.
+
+[Sidenote: ALCIPHRON. JULIAN]
+
+Of such "talking with a friend" we have unfortunately very few
+examples--hardly any at all--from older Greek. The greater
+collections--not much used in schools or colleges now but well enough
+known to those who really know Greek Literature--of Alciphron,
+Aristaenetus, Philostratus and (once most famous of all) Phalaris
+are--one must not perhaps say obvious, since men of no little worth were
+once taken in by them but--pretty easily discoverable counterfeits. They
+are sometimes, more particularly those of Philostratus, interesting and
+even beautiful;[2] they have been again sometimes at least supposed,
+particularly those of Alciphron, to give us, from the fact that they
+were largely based upon lost comedies, etc., information which we should
+otherwise lack; and in many instances (Aristaenetus is perhaps here the
+chief) they must have helped towards that late Greek creation of the
+Romance to which we owe so much. Nor have we here much if anything to do
+with such questions as the morality of personating dead authors, or that
+of laying traps for historians. It is enough that they do not give us,
+except very rarely, good letters: and that even these exceptions are not
+in any probability _real_ letters, real written "confabulations of
+friends" at all. Almost the first we have deserving such a description
+are those of the Emperor Julian in the fourth century of that Christ for
+whom he had such an unfortunate hatred; the most copious and thoroughly
+genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a little later. Of these
+Julian's are a good deal affected by the influence of Rhetoric, of which
+he was a great cultivator: and the peculiar later Platonism of Synesius
+fills a larger proportion of his than some frivolous persons might
+wish. Julian is even thought to have "written for publication," as Latin
+epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless
+it is pleasant to read the Apostate when he is not talking Imperial or
+anti-Christian "shop," but writing to his tutor, the famous sophist and
+rhetorician Libanius, about his travels and his books and what not, in a
+fashion by no means very unlike that in which a young Oxford graduate
+might write to an undonnish don. It is still pleasanter to find Synesius
+telling his friends about the very thin wine and very thick honey of
+Cyrenaica; making love ("camouflaged," as they say to-day, under
+philosophy) to Hypatia, and condescending to mention dogs, horses and
+hunting now and then. But it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk
+of this department of Greek literature is spurious to begin with, and
+uninteresting, even if spuriousness be permitted to pass. The Letters of
+Phalaris--once famous in themselves, again so as furnishing one of the
+chief battle-grounds in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel, and never to
+be forgotten because of their connection with Swift's _Battle of the
+Books_--are as dull as ditchwater in matter, and utterly destitute of
+literary distinction in style.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: ROMAN LETTER-WRITING]
+
+It is a rule, general and almost universal, that every branch of Latin
+literature is founded on, and more or less directly imitative of Greek.
+Even the Satire, which the Romans relied upon to prove that they could
+originate, is more apparently than really an invention. Also, though
+this may be more disputable, because much more a matter of personal
+taste, there were very few such branches in which the pupils equalled,
+much fewer in which they surpassed, their masters. But in both respects
+letter-writing may be said to be an exception. Unless we have been
+singularly unlucky in losing better Greek letters than we have, and
+extraordinarily fortunate in Fate's selection of the Latin letters that
+have come down to us, the Romans, though they were eager students of
+Rhetoric, and almost outwent their teachers in composing the empty
+things called Declamations, seem to have allowed this very practice to
+drain off mere verbosity, and to have written letters about matters
+which were worth pen, ink, paper and (as we should say) postage. We have
+in Greek absolutely no such letters from the flourishing time of the
+literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny[3] and even of Seneca--while as
+we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and Synesius in the older language
+cannot touch Sidonius Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus[4] in the
+younger. Of course all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine, while
+the Greek letters attributed to Plato, Socrates and other great men are
+almost without doubt and without exception spurious. But there is very
+little likelihood that the Greeks of the great times wrote many
+"matter-ful" letters at all. They lived in small communities, where they
+saw each other daily and almost hourly; they took little interest in the
+affairs of other communities unless they were at war with them, and
+when they did travel there were very few means of international
+communication.
+
+Women write the best letters, and get the best letters written to them:
+but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class
+and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima,[5] ever
+wrote at all. The Romans, after their early period, were not merely a
+larger and ever larger community full of the most various business, and
+constantly extending their presence and their sway; but, by their unique
+faculty of organisation, they put every part of their huge world in
+communication with every other part. Here also we lack women's letters;
+but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly off for those of men.
+There have even been some audacious heretics who have preferred Cicero's
+letters to his speeches and treatises; Seneca, the least attractive of
+those before mentioned, put well what the poet Wordsworth called in his
+own poems "extremely va_loo_able thoughts"; one of the keenest of
+mathematicians and best of academic and general business men known to
+the present writer, the late Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a
+special favourite of Pliny; and if people can find nothing worse to say
+against Sidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and not in what was
+for his time archaic, Latin, his case will not look bad in the eyes of
+sensible men.
+
+[Sidenote: SIDONIUS]
+
+Sidonius, like Synesius, was a Christian, and, though the observation
+may seem no more logical than Fluellen's about Macedon and Monmouth,
+besides being in more doubtful taste, there would seem to be some
+connection between the spread of Christianity and that of
+letter-writing. At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps because
+of the deficiency of formal literature during the "Dark" Ages. It is not
+really futile to point out that a very large part of the New Testament
+consists of "Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these epistles
+is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter. Even that which is so,
+often if not always, partakes of the character of a "live" letter to an
+extent which makes the so-called letters of the Greek Rhetoricians mere
+school exercises. And St. Paul's allusions to his journeys, his
+salutations, his acknowledgment of presents, his reference to the cloak
+and the books with its anxious "but especially the parchments," and his
+excellent advice to Timothy about beverages, are all the purest and most
+genuine matter for mail-bags. So is St. Peter's very gentleman-like (as
+it has been termed) retort to his brother Apostle; and so are both the
+Second and the Third of St. John. Indeed it is not fanciful to suggest
+that the account of the voyage which finishes the "Acts," and other
+parts of that very delightful book, are narratives much more of the kind
+one finds in letters than of the formally historical sort.
+
+However this may be, it is worth pointing out that the distrust of other
+pagan kinds of literature which the Fathers manifested so strongly, and
+which was inherited from them by the clergy of the "Dark," and to some
+extent the Middle Ages, clearly could not extend to the practice of the
+Apostles. If from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it
+must be remembered that from them we have little literature at all:
+while from the close of that period and the beginning of the next we
+have one of the most famous of all correspondences, the Letters of
+Abelard and Heloise. Of the intrinsic merit of these long-and far-famed
+compositions, as displaying character, there have been different
+opinions--one of the most damaging attacks on them may be found in
+Barbey d'Aurevilly's already mentioned book. But their influence has
+been lasting and enormous: and even if it were to turn out that they are
+forgeries, they are certainly early forgeries, and the person who forged
+them knew extremely well what he was about. There is no room here to
+survey, even in selection, the letter-crop of the Middle Ages; and from
+henceforward we must speak mainly, if not wholly (for some glances
+abroad may be permitted), of _English_ letters.[6] But the
+ever-increasing bonds of union--even of such union in disunion as
+war--between different European nations, and the developments of more
+complex civilisation, of more general education and the like--all tended
+and wrought in the same direction.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+LETTERS IN ENGLISH--BEFORE 1700
+
+
+Exceptions have sometimes been taken to the earliest collection of
+genuine private letters, not official communications written in or
+inspired by Latin--which we possess in English. "The Paston Letters"
+have been, from opposite sides, accused of want of literary form and of
+not giving us interesting enough details in substance. The objections in
+either case[7] are untenable, and in both rather silly. In the first
+place "literary form" in the fifteenth century was exceedingly likely to
+be bad literary form, and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir
+Thomas Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John
+Fortescue had occupied there something like the position of Mr.
+Tulkinghorn in _Bleak House_, we should not have got much "literature"
+from any known prose-writer of the period. Nor was it wanted. As for
+interestingness of matter, the people who expect newspaper-correspondent
+fine writing about the Wars of the Roses may be disappointed; but some
+of us who have had experience of that dialect from the Russells of the
+Crimea through the Forbeses of 1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon the
+other day will probably not be very unhappy. The Paston Letters are
+simply genuine family correspondence--of a genuineness all the more
+certain because of their commonplaceness. It is impossible to conceive
+anything further from the initial type of the Greek rhetorical "letter"
+of which we have just been saying something. They are not, to any but an
+excessively "high-browed" and high-flying person, uninteresting: but the
+chief point about them is their solidity and their satisfaction, in
+their own straightforward unvarnished way, of the test we started with.
+When Margaret Paston and the rest write, it is because they have
+something to say to somebody who cannot be actually spoken to. And that
+something is said.
+
+[Sidenote: ASCHAM]
+
+The next body of letters--Ascham's--which seems to call for notice here
+is of the next century. It has not a few points of appeal, more than one
+of which concern us very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston
+Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated,
+persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of
+the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages
+struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one
+of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself--that is to say,
+of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a
+diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well
+as a schoolmaster. And while from all these points of view his letters
+have interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps more
+interesting to us than any other: and that is the fact that while he
+begins to write in Latin--the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of
+the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not
+definitely scholarly, throughout Europe--he exchanges this for English
+latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of
+reasons for writing the _Toxophilus_ in our own and his own tongue.
+There is indeed a double attraction, which has not been always or often
+noticed, in this change of practice. Everybody has seen how important it
+is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary
+scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the
+bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the
+continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not
+entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But
+perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it acknowledges the
+peculiar character of the genuine letter--that, though it may be a work
+of art, it should not be one of artifice--that it is a matter of
+"business _or_ bosoms," not of study or display.
+
+Contemporary with these letters of Ascham, and going on to the end of
+the century and the closely coincident end of the reign of Elizabeth, we
+have a considerable bulk of letter-writing of more or less varied kinds.
+The greatest men of letters of the time--to the disgust of one, but not
+wholly so to that of another, class of "scholar"--give us little.
+Spenser is the most considerable exception: and his correspondence with
+Gabriel Harvey, though it is personal to a certain extent and on
+Gabriel's side sufficiently character-revealing, is really of the hybrid
+kind, partaking rather more of pamphlet or essay than of letter proper.
+Indeed a good part of that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this
+time, which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of
+attention, takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from
+genuine letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito" and
+"Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's; we have laments from
+others, such as Lyly and Googe, about their disappointments as
+courtiers; we have a good deal of State correspondence. There are some,
+not very many, agreeable letters of strictly private character in whole
+or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of Sir Philip
+Sydney's mother, Lady Mary Dudley. Others are from time to time being
+made public, such as those in Dr. Williamson's recent book on the
+Admiral-Earl of Cumberland. As far as mere bulk goes, Elizabethan
+epistolography would take no small place, just as it would claim no mean
+one in point of interest. But in an even greater degree than its
+successor (_v. inf._) this _corpus_ would expose itself to the criticism
+that the time for perfect letter-writing was not quite yet, in this day
+of so much that was perfect, that the style was not quite the right
+style, the knack not yet quite achieved. And if the present writer--who
+swore fealty to Elizabethan literature a full third of a century ago
+after informal allegiance for nearly as long a time earlier--admits some
+truth in this, there probably is some. The letters included in it
+attract us more for the matter they contain than for the manner in which
+they contain it: and when this is the case no branch of literature has
+perfected itself in art.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
+
+The position of the seventeenth century in England with regard to
+letter-writing has been the subject of rather different opinions. The
+bulk of its contributions is of course very considerable: and some of
+the groups are of prominent importance, the most singular, if not the
+most excellent, being Cromwell's, again to be mentioned. As in other
+cases and departments this century offers a curious "split" between its
+earlier part which declines--not in goodness but like human life in
+vitality--from, but still preserves the character of, the pure
+Elizabethan, and its later, which grows up again--not in goodness but
+simply in the same vitality--towards the Augustan. This relationship is
+sufficiently illustrated in the actual letters. The great political
+importance of the Civil War of course reflects itself in them. Indeed it
+may almost be said that for some time letters are wholly concerned with
+such things, though of course there are partial exceptions, such as
+those of Dorothy Osborne--"mild Dorothea" as she afterwards became,
+though there is no mere mildness of the contemptuous meaning in her
+correspondence. In most remarkable contrast to these stand the somewhat
+earlier letters of James Howell--our first examples perhaps of letters
+"written for publication" in the fullest sense, very agreeably varied in
+subject and great favourites with a good many people, notably
+Thackeray--but only in part (if at all) genuine private correspondence.
+
+Not a few men otherwise distinguished in literature wrote
+letters--sometimes in curious contrast with other productions of theirs.
+The most remarkable instance of this, but an instance easily
+comprehensible, is that of Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense
+correspondence has ever been printed, but there is no reason to expect
+from the remainder--whether actually extant, mislaid or lost--anything
+better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the
+most part the very opposite in every respect of the famous and
+delectable Diary. They are perfectly "proper," and for the most part
+extremely dull; while propriety is certainly not the most salient
+characteristic of the Diary; and the diarist manages, in the most
+eccentric manner, to communicate interest not merely to things more
+specially regarded as "interesting," but to his accounts and his
+ailments, his business and his political history. His contemporary and
+rather patronising friend Evelyn keeps his performances less far apart
+from each other: but is certainly, though a representative, not a great
+letter-writer, and the few that we have of Pepys' patronised
+fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden are of no great mark, though not superfluous.
+In the earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken off its
+control as the epistolary language; and it was not till quite the other
+end that English itself became supple and docile enough for the purposes
+of the letter-writer proper. It was excellent for such things as formal
+Dedications, semi-historical narratives, and the like. And it could, as
+in Sir Thomas Browne's, supply another contrast, much more pleasing than
+that referred to above, of domestic familiarity with a most poetical
+transcendence of style in published work. Yet, as was the case with the
+novel, the letter, to gain perfection, still wanted something easier
+than the grand style of the seventeenth century and more polished than
+its familiar style.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
+
+But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in respect of
+letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance,
+hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in
+the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent
+of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European
+literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence--French
+and English--the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters:
+and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most
+famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and
+Cowper--belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"--our most famous
+she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield,
+whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men
+just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more
+remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
+itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the
+letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this
+time is not really more important than the abundance, variety and
+popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
+of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the
+"letterwritingest" of ages from almost every point of view. In its least
+as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if not into
+poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on classical
+models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more
+modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_, started the
+fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of
+print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's
+good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like
+Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian
+times, if then. At the present moment one does not remember an exact
+equivalent in England to the story of two good writers in French if not
+French writers[8] living in the same house, meeting constantly during
+the day, yet exchanging letters, and not short ones, before breakfast.
+But very likely there is or was one, and more than one.
+
+For those no doubt estimable persons who are not content with facts but
+must have some explanations of them, it is less difficult to supply such
+things than is sometimes the case. One--the attainment at last of a
+"middle" style neither grand nor vulgar--has already been glanced at. It
+has been often and quite truly observed that there are sentences,
+passages, paragraphs, almost whole letters in Horace Walpole and Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu, in Fanny Burney and in Cowper, which no one would
+think old-fashioned at the present day in any context where modern slang
+did not suggest itself as natural. But this was by no means the only
+predisposing cause, though perhaps most of the others were, in this way
+or that, connected with it. Both in France and in England literature
+and social matters generally were in something like what political
+economists call "the stationary state" till (as rather frequently
+happens with such apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed
+to the Niagara of the French Revolution, and the rapids of the
+quarter-century War. There were no great poets:[9] and even
+verse-writers were rarely grand: but there was a greater diffusion of
+competent writing faculty than had been seen before or perhaps--for all
+the time, talk, trouble, and money spent on "education,"--has been
+since. New divisions and departments of interest were accumulating--not
+merely in Literature itself[10] (as to which, if people's ideas were
+rather limited, they _had_ ideas), but in the arts which were in some
+cases practised almost for the first time and in all taken more
+seriously, in foreign and home politics, commerce, manufactures, all
+manner of things. People were by no means so apt to stay in the same
+place as they had been: and when friends were in different places they
+had much easier means of communicating with each other. Nor should it be
+forgotten that the more elaborate system of ceremonial manners which
+then prevailed, but which has been at first gradually, and latterly with
+a run, breaking down for the last hundred years, had an important
+influence on letter-writing. One does not of course refer merely to
+elaborate formulas of beginning and ending--such as make even the
+greatest praisers of times past among us smile a little when they find
+Dr. Johnson addressing his own step-daughter as "Dear Madam," and being
+her "most humble servant" though in the course of the letter he may use
+the most affectionate and intimate expressions. But the manners of
+yester-year made it obligatory to make your letters--unless they were
+merely what were called "cards" of invitation, message, etc.--to some
+extent _substantive_. You gave the news of the day, if your
+correspondent was not likely to know it; the news of the place,
+especially if you were living in a University town or a Cathedral city.
+If you had read a book you very often criticised it: if you had been to
+any kind of entertainment you reported on it, etc. etc. Of course all
+this is still done by people who really do write real letters: but it is
+certainly done by a much smaller proportion of letter-writers than was
+the case two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago. The
+newspaper has probably done more to kill letters than any penny post,
+halfpenny postcard or even sixpenny telegram could do. Nor perhaps have
+we yet mentioned the most powerful destructive agent of all, and that is
+the ever increasing want of leisure. The dulness of modern Jack, in
+letters as elsewhere, arises from the fact that when he is not at work
+he is too desperately set on playing to have time for anything else. The
+Augustans are not usually thought God-like: but they have this of Gods,
+that they "lived _easily_."
+
+There is perhaps still something to be said as to the apparently almost
+pre-established harmony between the eighteenth century and
+letter-writing. It concerns what has been called the "_Peace_ of the
+Augustans"; the at least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of
+passion and the most riotous kinds of fun. Tragedy may be very fine in
+letters, as it may be anywhere: but it is in them the most
+dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of
+all motives--again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but
+it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in--not
+roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being
+excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne
+and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at
+any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the
+best of their letters. The person who is bored by any one of those sets
+which have been mentioned must bring the boredom with him--as, by the
+way, complainers of that state of suffering do much oftener than they
+wot of. Nor is much less to be said of scores of less famous epistolers
+of the time, from the generation of Berkeley and Byrom to that of Scott
+and Southey.
+
+[Sidenote: SWIFT]
+
+To begin with Swift, it is a scarcely disputable fact that opinions
+about this giant of English literature--not merely as to his personal
+character, though perhaps this has had more to do with the matter than
+appears on the surface, but as to his exact literary value--have
+differed almost incomprehensibly. Johnson thought, or at least
+affected to think, that _A Tale of a Tub_ could not be Swift's,
+because it was too good for him, and that "Tom Davies might have
+written _The Conduct of the Allies_": while on the other hand
+Thackeray, indulging in the most extravagant denunciation of Swift as
+a man, did the very fullest, though not in the least too full, homage
+to his genius. But one does not know many things more surprising in
+the long list of contradictory criticisms of man and genius alike,
+than Mr. Herbert Paul's disapproval of the _Journal to Stella_ as
+letters while admitting its excellence as "narrative."[12] To other
+judges these are some of the most perfect letters in existence, some
+of the most absolutely genuine and free from the slightest taint of
+writing for publication; some of the most extraordinarily blended of
+intense intimacy which is neither ridiculous nor productive of the
+shame-faced feeling that you ought not to have heard it; and full of
+that dealing with matters less intimate but still interesting to both
+correspondents which displays the "narrative" excellence conceded by
+this acute critic. It must of course be remembered that these
+"Journal-letters" are by no means Swift's only proofs of his
+epistolary expertness. The Vanessa ones perhaps display a little of
+the hopelessly enigmatic character which spreads like a mist over the
+whole of that ill-starred relationship: but they make all the more
+useful contrast to the "wholeheartedness"--one may even use that word
+in reference to the little bit of what we may call constructive
+deception as to "the other person"--of those to her rival.[13] Those
+to Pope (of which so shabby a use was made by their strangely
+constituted recipient), to Bolingbroke and others are among the best
+of friendly letters: and the curious batch to the Duchess of
+Queensberry might be classed with those "court-paying" letters of man
+to woman which are elsewhere more particularly noted. But the "Stella"
+or "Stella-cum-Dingley" division (if that most singular of
+value-completing zeros is to be brought in) is a thing by itself.
+Perhaps appreciating or not appreciating the "little language" is a
+matter very largely of personal constitution, and the failure to
+appreciate is (like colour-blindness or other physical deficiencies) a
+thing to be sorry for, not to condemn. But one might have thought that
+even if what we may call "feeling" of this were absent there would be
+an intellectual understanding of the way in which it completes the
+whole-heartedness just mentioned--the manner in which the writer deals
+with politics, society, letters, the common ways of life, and his own
+passion--this last sometimes in the fore-sometimes in the background,
+but never far off. Other letters, from Horace Walpole's downwards, may
+contain a panorama of life as brilliant as these give, or more
+brilliant. Yet it is too frequently a panorama or a puppet show, or at
+the best a marvellously acted but somewhat bloodless drama. On the
+other hand, the pure passion-letters lack as a rule this
+many-sidedness. With Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection
+shown us more varied interests. But through it all there is an
+anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his--"Only a woman's
+hair"--and that hair threads, in subtle fashion, the whole of the
+Journal, turning the panorama to something felt as well as seen, and
+the puppet-show to realities of flesh and blood.
+
+That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable
+pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally
+allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for
+"my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did
+not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart
+he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions
+here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet
+had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse
+attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of
+Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride.
+Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal
+at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and
+the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir
+John Chester" in _Barnaby Rudge_ it is not so much a caricature as a
+sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the
+Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have
+been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find
+them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as
+between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various.
+Lady Mary's forte--perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner
+and part namesake, Marie de Sévigné, though she spoke inadvisedly of
+her--lies in description of places and manners, and in literary
+criticism.[14] Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and
+of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc.,
+rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical
+acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might
+almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also,
+she does all these things naturally--with that naturalness at
+which--when they possess it at all--women are so much better than men.
+People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself.
+(One thinks by the way one has seen men do that.) But after all what the
+glass gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women learn to see
+it in others as well as in themselves.
+
+[Sidenote: CHESTERFIELD]
+
+Few English writers have suffered more injustice in popular estimation
+than Chesterfield. Even putting aside the abuse by which, as above
+mentioned, Johnson showed (on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that
+he had more in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both their
+names--that is to say an _insanabile vulnus_ of vanity--there remain
+sources of mistakes and prejudice which have been all too freely tapped.
+The miscellaneous letters--which show sides of him quite different from
+those most in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son"--are rarely
+read: these latter have been, at least once and probably oftener, made
+into a schoolbook for translation into other languages--an office by no
+means likely to conciliate affection. And even when they are not
+suspected of positive immorality there is a too general idea that they
+are frivolously and trivially didactic--the sort of thing that Mr.
+Turveydrop the elder might have written on Deportment--if he had had
+brains enough. Yet again, unbiassed appreciation of them has been
+hampered by all sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that
+young Stanhope actually turned out to be--a point of merely gossiping
+importance in any case, and, whatever be the facts of this one, having
+no more to do with the merit of the letters than the other fact that
+some people make mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the
+multiplication table has to do with the value of that composition. As a
+matter of relevant fact the letters--except (and even here the
+accusations against them are much exaggerated) from the point of view of
+very severe morality in regard to one or two points--perhaps no more
+than one--are full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe
+experience of the world. The manners they recommend are not those of any
+but a very exceptional "dancing master," they are those of a gentleman.
+The temper that they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator
+is positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and the other
+batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor in the Earldom (the Lord
+Chesterfield for forging whose name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most
+curious and unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the
+highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused of being
+nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young--at
+first very young--boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and
+women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise--the
+thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite
+different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15]
+worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real
+Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all
+these letters--though most attractively in those to his son--a power of
+literary expression which would have made the fortune of any
+professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was
+too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was,
+within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere
+taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He
+could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is
+attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some
+of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even
+dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the
+time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly
+serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few
+contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day
+show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or
+Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write
+Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.[16] Now
+the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately
+connected forms of literature.
+
+[Sidenote: HORACE WALPOLE]
+
+Horace Walpole--like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English
+aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just
+discussed--has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of
+whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his
+letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works)
+dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the
+subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those
+antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the
+writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to
+be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very
+acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he
+admits Horace's _esprit_ pronounces it _un fruit brillant, amer, et
+glacé_. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a
+man--if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially
+so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly
+awkward--though from one point of view not wholly unamiable--peculiarity
+of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for
+your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and
+should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most
+part, if not almost always, to _back_-bite your friends' supposed
+enemies--often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on
+the particular occasion--is the act at the best of an intempestively
+officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing
+this in regard to all sorts of people--his abuse of Johnson himself, of
+Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal
+excuse or reason whatsoever.
+
+His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of
+other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such
+matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to
+those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He
+had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important
+kinds of literature, as _The Mysterious Mother_ and _The Castle of
+Otranto_ showed--a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters.
+But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save,
+perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate.
+Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though
+he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed
+several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was
+young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of
+Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema
+and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of
+sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him
+was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal
+and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.
+
+But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best
+letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work
+along with variety of subject; maintenance of interest and craftsmanship
+as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard
+edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in
+sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good
+taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to
+sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sévigné's
+own--which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the
+feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously--exhibiting the
+possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.
+
+To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in
+such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would
+seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as
+any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray,
+in the wonderful chapter of _The Virginians_ where Horace is made to
+describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite
+imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter
+so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character--his own
+that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's--are
+constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a
+plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of _review_ of the
+subject--larger or smaller--from the really masterly accounts of the
+trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial
+notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at
+cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his
+windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters
+appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated
+love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity
+(a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for);
+the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except
+religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and
+really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag.
+And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success.
+There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort
+of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our
+ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes
+and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and
+that of a kind that does not stale itself.
+
+The fact would seem to be that the art of letter-writing is a sort of
+mosaic or macédoine of nearly all departments of the general Art of
+Literature. You want constant touches of the art narrative, and not very
+seldom some of the art dramatic. Always you want that of
+conversation--subtly differentiated. Occasionally, though in the
+ordinary letter not very often, you want argument: much oftener
+description. Pathos, tenderness, etc., are more exceptionally required:
+and it is, in modern times at least, generally accepted that in the
+letter consolatory, that almost greatest of Shakespearian magic phrases,
+"the rest is silence" should never be forgotten and very quickly
+applied. Wit is welcome, if it be well managed: but that is a pretty
+constant proviso in regard to the particular element. Perhaps the
+greatest negative caution of all is that the letter should not be
+_obviously_ "written for publication."
+
+Now the curious thing about Walpole is that his letters were, pretty
+certainly in some cases (those to Mann) and not improbably in nearly
+all, written with some view to publication if only of a limited sort,
+and yet that the intention is rarely prominent to an offensive degree.
+Even if we did not know the curious and disgusting tricks that Pope
+played with his, we should be certain that he was always thinking of the
+possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were
+addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact
+in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in
+any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends.
+An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that
+the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If
+so, all the more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather in
+his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake the writer, his
+letters take a slight but sufficient colour of difference according to
+the personality of the recipient. He does not write to Montagu exactly
+as he writes to Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as to
+earlier she-correspondents. So once more, though there are large and
+important possible subjects for letters on which "Horry" does not write
+at all, it is questionable whether, everything being counted in that he
+has, and no unfair offsets allowed for what he does not attempt, we have
+in English any superior to him as a letter-writer.
+
+[Sidenote: GRAY]
+
+The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler--Walpole's
+schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which
+Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were
+doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend--is curiously
+different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic
+imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who
+are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other
+intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar,
+while his friend was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the
+scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable extent: and
+thus was enabled to display an orderliness of thought by no means
+universal in men of letters, and (at least according to common
+estimation) positively rare in poets. His tastes were as various as his
+friend's: but instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and
+dislikings, they were aesthetically conceived and connected. He was not
+exactly an amiable person: indeed, though there was less spitefulness in
+him than in Horace there was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for
+the feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed itself
+so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold--that he "never spoke out"--it might be
+thought, if it really existed, to have been rather fatal to
+letter-writing, in which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one
+of the very last things to be desired. And some of the positive
+characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated (not the
+poetry--poets have usually been good epistolers) might not seem much
+more suitable.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, Gray _is_ a good letter-writer--a very
+good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as might be expected from what
+has been said, carry much heavier metal than Horace's; but in another
+sense they are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in bulk
+than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative" though hardly more
+leisured writer:[19] and--as not a defect but a consequence of the
+quality just attributed to them--they do not quite carry the reader
+along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others.
+But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is
+astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of
+his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love
+(one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure
+that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which
+would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even
+more decided than that assigned to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's
+enemy or at least "incompatible" Johnson.[20] His letters of travel are
+admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes extremely
+prejudiced, very clever; those of University society and squabbles among
+the very best that we have in English; those touching "the picturesque"
+extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those touching literature
+among the least one-sided of their time. If there are, as observed or
+hinted above, some unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the
+poor creature Mason; his general attitude to his friends the Whartons;
+and his communications with younger men like Norton Nicholls and
+Bonstetten, go far to remove, or, at least, to counterbalance, the
+impression.
+
+This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason, emphasize what is
+evident enough in almost all, a freedom on his part (which from some
+things in his character and history we might not altogether have
+expected) from a fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in
+letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or
+less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side," "patronising," etc.
+He may sometimes come near this pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never
+quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour
+which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse
+and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may
+be said to have few superiors in the combination of intellectual weight
+and force with "pastime" interest. To some of course they may be chiefly
+or additionally interesting because of such light as they throw or
+withhold on a rather problematic character, but this, like the allegory
+in Spenser according to Hazlitt, "won't bite" anyone who lets it alone.
+They are extremely good letters to read: and the more points of interest
+they provide for any reader the better for that reader himself. Once
+more too, they illustrate the principle laid down at the beginning of
+this paper. They are good letters because they are, with the usual
+subtle difference necessary, like very good talk, recorded.[21]
+
+[Sidenote: COWPER]
+
+Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our
+selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone
+through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of
+critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much
+in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much
+behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a
+very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early
+nineteenth century became known, when he "drove" young persons like
+Marianne Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods
+succeed and do not resemble each other.[22] He had probably less hold on
+this time--when he had the best chance of popularity--than Crabbe, one
+of his own group, while he was destitute of the extraordinary
+appeals--which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt
+are unmistakable--of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the
+seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful "asset" as people say
+nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side.
+But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became
+known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may
+be some unfortunates for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly reckon
+as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless
+you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as
+a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called
+them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence:
+while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and
+perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may
+say--by no means in his haste, but after consideration--not merely
+"Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth
+did it happen that the writer of these _ever_ went mad?" even with the
+assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.
+
+For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and
+pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with
+insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from
+it. There is a quiet humour--not of the fantastic kind which, as in
+Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to
+_over_-balance of mind--but _counter_-balancing, antiseptic, _salt_.
+There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent
+manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we
+are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of
+ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem,
+"What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble
+substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency
+and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief. But it
+is quite relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are
+things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing. And sometimes
+one cannot help regretfully wondering whether, if he--who dealt so
+admirably with such interests as were open to him--had had more and
+wider ones to deal with, _we_ should not have had still more varied and
+still more delightful letters, and _he_ would have escaped the terrible
+fate that fell on him. For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish
+in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave
+too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the
+very hotbed of mental disease.
+
+It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and it perhaps
+shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty is when it is
+possessed--that Cowper's letters are as good as they are: while that
+point of view also helps us to understand why they are sometimes not so
+good.
+
+    Of all the floating thoughts we find
+    Upon the surface of the mind,
+
+as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing, there
+are few in his case which are of more unequal value than his criticisms.
+Cowper had more than one of the makings of a critic, and a very
+important critic. He was, or at any rate had been once, something of a
+scholar; he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps even
+often the case) helped _knowingly_ to effect, one of the most
+epoch-making changes in English literature. But for the greater part of
+his life he read very little; he had little chance of anything like
+literary discussion with his peers; and accordingly his critical remarks
+are random, uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at the
+moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or disagreement.
+
+But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as a letter-writer so
+little as for things of this kind: and even things of this kind take the
+benefit of what Coleridge happily called--and what everybody has since
+wisely followed Coleridge in calling--his "divine chit-chat." As with
+Walpole--though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best
+things have from one another--it does not in the least matter what,
+among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his
+conversation--and some of the few _habitués_ of Olney say it was--was
+anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over
+even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not appetite" as they
+said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon
+them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than
+more mannerless periods will allow.
+
+And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary
+power of making anything interesting--of entirely transcending the
+subject--which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater
+measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.
+The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very
+smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance and condition of the fish
+his correspondents buy for him or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish
+and lived, before railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the
+most uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most
+characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief descant on
+wigs with a suggestion that fashion should decree the cutting off of
+people's own legs and the substitution of artificial ones); the height
+of chairs and candlesticks--anything will do. He remarks gravely
+somewhere, "What nature expressly designed me for, I have never been
+able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the
+common and customary occupations and amusements of mankind." Perhaps
+poetry--at least poetry of the calibre of "Yardley Oak," and "The
+Castaway," of "Boadicea" and the "Royal George" in one division; of
+"John Gilpin" in the other, may not be quite properly classed among the
+"common and customary occupations of mankind." But letter-writing might
+without great impropriety be so classed: and there cannot be the
+slightest doubt that Nature intended Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether
+he writes "The passages and events of the day as well as of the night
+are little better than dreams" or "An almost general cessation of
+egg-laying among the hens has made it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to
+enterprise a cake" one has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that
+agreeable sensation which at one time visited Tennyson's Northern
+Farmer. One "thinks he's said what he ought to 'a said" in the exact
+manner in which he ought to have said it.
+
+[Sidenote: MINORS]
+
+It is however most important to remember that these Five are only, as it
+were, commanding officers of the great Army, representative of the very
+numerous constituents, who do the service and enjoy the franchise of
+letter-writing in the eighteenth century. There is hardly a writer of
+distinction in any other kind whose letters are not noteworthy; and
+there are very numerous letter-writers of interest who are scarcely
+distinguished in any other way. Perhaps Fielding disappoints us most in
+this section by the absence of correspondence, all the more so that the
+"Voyage to Lisbon" is practically letter-stuff of the best. From
+Smollett also we might have more--especially more like his letter to
+Wilkes on the subject of the supposed impressment of Johnson's negro
+servant Frank, which we hope to give here. Sterne's character would
+certainly be better if his astonishing daughter had suppressed some of
+his epistles, but it would be much less distinct, and they are often, if
+sometimes discreditably so, amusing if not edifying. The vast mass of
+Richardson's correspondence would correspond in another sense to the
+volume of his novels. We have letters from Berkeley at the beginning and
+others from Gibbon at the end--these last peculiarly valuable, because,
+as sometimes but not perhaps very often happens, they do not merely
+illustrate but supplement and complete the published work. From ladies,
+courtly, domestic, literary and others, we have shelves--and cases--and
+almost libraries full; from the lively chat of the Lepels and Bellendens
+and Howards of the early Georgian time to those copious and unstudied
+but never dull, compositions which Fanny Burney poured forth to "Susan
+and Fredy," to Maria Allen and to "Daddy Crisp" and a score of others;
+those of the Montagu circle; the documents upon which some have based
+aspersion and others defence of Mrs. Thrale; and the prose utterances of
+the "Swan of Lichfield," otherwise Miss Seward.[24] There are
+Shenstone's letters for samples of one kind and those of the Revd. Mr.
+Warner (the supposed original of Thackeray's Parson Sampson) for another
+and very different one. Even outside the proper and real "mail-bag"
+letter all sorts of writings--travels, pamphlets, philosophical and
+theological arguments, almost everything--throw themselves into the
+letter form. To come back to that with which we began there is no doubt
+that the eighteenth century is the century of the letter with us.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY
+
+
+[Sidenote: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUPS]
+
+There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting here that
+the art of letter-writing died with the century in which it flourished
+so greatly. In the first place, periods of literary art seldom or never
+"die" in a moment like a tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion
+that centennial years necessarily divide such periods, as well as the
+centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical delusion. There have
+been dates in our history--1400 was one of them--where something of the
+kind seems to have happened: but they are very rare. Most ships of
+literature at such times are fortunately what is called in actual ships
+"clinker-built"--that is to say overlappingly--and except at 1600 this
+has never been so much the case as two hundred years later and one
+hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
+Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty
+years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of
+them well, past the conventional "coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and
+Shelley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first
+mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century
+idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from
+Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Shelley
+and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two
+individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns
+letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer,
+and nobody who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so.
+The first requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"--in a rather
+peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it has been
+employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth could _preach_--nearly
+always in a manner deserving respect and sometimes in one commanding
+almost infinite admiration; but when the letter-writer begins to preach
+he is in danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's
+letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but more than one
+of his weaknesses appears in them.
+
+The excellence of Scott's, though always discoverable in Lockhart, was
+perhaps never easily appreciable till they were separately collected and
+published not very many years ago. It may indeed be suggested that the
+"Life and Letters" system, though very valuable as regards the "Life" is
+apt a little to obscure the excellence of the "Letters" themselves. Of
+this particular collection it is not too much to say that while it threw
+not the least stain on the character of one of the most faultless (one
+singular and heavily punished lapse excepted) of men of letters, it
+positively enhanced our knowledge of the variety of his literary powers.
+
+Perhaps however the best of letter-writers amongst these four
+protagonists of the great Romantic Revival in England (the inevitable
+attempt sometimes made now to quarrel with that term is as inevitably
+silly) is the least good poet. Southey's letters, never yet fully but
+very voluminously published, have not been altogether fortunate in
+their fashion of publication. There have been questionings about the
+propriety of "Selected" Works; but there surely can be little doubt that
+in the case of Letters a certain amount of selection is not only
+justifiable but almost imperative. Everyone at all addicted to
+correspondence must know that in writing to different people on the same
+or closely adjacent days, if "anything has" in the common phrase
+"happened" he is bound to repeat himself. He may, if he has the sense of
+art, take care to vary his phrase even though he knows that no two
+letters will have the same reader; but he cannot vary his matter much.
+Southey's letters, in the two collections by his son and his son-in-law,
+were edited without due regard to this: and the third--those to Caroline
+Bowles, his second wife--might have been "thinned" in a different way.
+But the bulk of interesting matter is still very large and the quality
+of the presentation is excellent. If anyone fears to plunge into some
+dozen volumes let him look at the "Cats" and the "Statues" of Greta
+Hall, printed at the end of the _Doctor_, but both in form and nature
+letters. He will not hesitate much longer, if he knows good letter-stuff
+when he sees it.[25]
+
+[Sidenote: LANDOR]
+
+Most of the second group wrote letters worth reading, but only one of
+them reaches the first rank in the art; it is true that he is among the
+first _of_ the first. The letters of Landor supply not the least part of
+that curious problem which is presented by his whole work. They
+naturally give less room than the _apices_ of his regular prose and of
+his poetry for that marvellous perfection of style and phrase which is
+allowed even by those who complain of a want of substance in him. And
+another complaint of his "aloofness" affects them in two ways rather
+damagingly. When it is present it cuts at the root of one of the chief
+interests of letters, which is intimacy. When it is absent, and Landor
+presents himself in his well-known character of an angry baby (as for
+instance when he remarked of the Bishop who did not do something he
+wanted, that "God alone is great enough for him [Walter Savage Landor]
+to ask anything of _twice_") he becomes merely--or perhaps to very
+amiable folk rather painfully--ridiculous. De Quincey and Hazlitt
+diverted a good deal of what might have been utilised as mere
+letter-writing faculty into their very miscellaneous work for
+publication. Moore could write very good letters himself: but is perhaps
+most noted and notable in connection with the subject as being one of
+the earliest and best "Life-and-Letters" craftsmen in regard to Byron.
+
+But none of these restrictions or provisos is requisite, or could for a
+moment be thought of, in reference to Charles Lamb. Of him, as of hardly
+any other writer of great excellence (perhaps Thackeray is most like him
+in this way) it can be said that if we had nothing but his letters we
+should almost be able to detect the qualities which he shows in his
+regular works. Some of the _Essays of Elia_ and his other miscellanies
+are or pretend to be actual letters. Certainly not a few of his letters
+would seem not at all strange and by no means unable to hold up their
+heads, if they had appeared as Essays of that singularly fortunate
+Italian who had his name taken, _not_ in vain but in order to be titular
+author of some of the choicest things in literature.
+
+Indeed that unique combination of bookishness and native fancy which
+makes the "Eliesque" quality is obviously as well suited to the letter
+as to the essay, and would require but a stroke or two of the pen, in
+addition or deletion, to produce examples of either. One often feels as
+if it must have been, as the saying goes, a toss-up whether the _London
+Magazine_ or some personal friend got a particular composition; whether
+it was issued to the public direct or waited for Serjeant Talfourd to
+collect and edit it. The two English writers whom, on very different
+sides of course, Lamb most resembles, and whom he may be said to have
+copied (of course as genius copies) most, are Sterne and Sir Thomas
+Browne. But between the actual letters and the actual works of these
+two, themselves, there is a great difference, while (as has just been
+noted) in Lamb's case there is none. The reason of course is that though
+Sir Thomas is one of our very greatest authors and the Reverend Yorick
+not by any means unplaced in the running for greatness, both are in the
+highest degree artificial: while Lamb's way of writing, complex as it
+is, necessitating as it must have done not a little reading and (as
+would seem almost necessary) not a little practice, seems to run as
+naturally as a child's babble. The very tricks--mechanical dots, dashes,
+aposiopeses--which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar
+Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from
+Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are
+born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at
+all. Now this naturalness--it can hardly be said too often here--is the
+one thing needful in letters. The different forms of it may be as
+various and as far apart from each other as those of the other Nature
+in flora or fauna, on mountain and sea, in field and town. But if it is
+there, all is right.
+
+[Sidenote: BYRON]
+
+There are few more interesting groups in the population of our subject
+than that formed by the three poets whom we mentioned last when
+classifying the epistolers of the early nineteenth century. There is
+hardly one of them who has not been ranked by some far from contemptible
+judgments among our greatest as poets; and merely as letter-writers they
+have been put correspondingly high by others or the same. It is rather
+curious that the most contested as to his place as a poet has been, as a
+rule, allowed it most easily as a letter-writer. The enormous vogue
+which Byron's verse at once attained both at home and abroad--has at
+home if not abroad (where reputations of poets often depend upon
+extra-poetical causes) long ceased to be undisputed: indeed has chiefly
+been sustained by spasmodic and not too successful exertions of
+individuals. It was never, of course, paralleled in regard to his
+letters. But these letters early obtained high repute and have never, in
+the general estimate, lost it. Some good judges even among those who do
+not care very much for the poems, have gone so far as to put him among
+our very best epistolers; and few have put him very much lower.
+Acceptance of the former estimate certainly--perhaps even of the
+latter--depends however upon the extent to which people can also accept
+recognition in Byron of the qualities of "Sincerity and Strength." That
+he was always a great though often a careless craftsman, and sometimes a
+great artist in literature, nobody possessed of the slightest critical
+ability can deny or doubt. But there are some who shake their heads over
+the attribution of anything like "sincerity" to him, except very
+occasionally: and who if they had to translate his "strength" into Greek
+would select the word _Bia_ ("violence") and not the word _Kratos_
+(simple "strength") from the _dramatis personae_ of the _Prometheus
+Vinctus_. Now "sincerity" of a kind--even of that kind which we found in
+Walpole and did not find in Pope--has been contended for here as a
+necessity in the best, if not in all good, letters; and "violence" is
+almost fatal to them. Of a certain kind of letter Byron was no doubt a
+skilful practitioner.[26] But to some it will or may always seem that
+the vital principle of his correspondence is to that of the real "Best"
+as stage life to life off the stage. These two can sometimes approach
+each other marvellously: but they are never the same thing.
+
+[Sidenote: SHELLEY]
+
+When Mr. Matthew Arnold expressed the opinion that Shelley's letters
+were more valuable than his poetry it was, of course, as Lamb said of
+Coleridge "only his fun." In the words of another classic, he "did it to
+annoy, because he knew it teased" some people. The absurdity is perhaps
+best antagonised by the perfectly true remark that it only shows that
+Mr. Arnold understood the letters and did not understand the poetry. But
+it was a little unfortunate, not for the poetry but for the letters,
+against which it might create a prejudice. They are so good that they
+ought not to have been made victims of what in another person the same
+judge would have called, and rightly, a _saugrenu_[27] judgment. Like
+all good letters--perhaps all without exception according to Demetrius
+and Newman--they carry with them much of their author's idiosyncrasy,
+but in a fashion which should help to correct certain misjudgments of
+that idiosyncrasy itself. Shelley _is_ "unearthly," but it is an entire
+mistake to suppose that his unearthliness can never become earthly to
+such an extent as is required. The beginning of _The Recollection_ ("We
+wandered to the pine forest") is as vivid a picture of actual scenery as
+ever appeared on the walls of any Academy: and _The Witch of Atlas_
+itself, not to mention the portrait-frescoes in _Adonais_, is quite a
+_waking_ dream. The quality of liveness is naturally still more
+prominent in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not
+there required to accompany it. But it _does_ accompany now and then;
+and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing almost as unlike
+anything else as the writer's poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower)
+kind hardly less perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely
+foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is perhaps
+excessive. But they comment and complete the Shelley of the Poems
+themselves in a manner for which we cannot be too thankful.
+
+[Sidenote: KEATS]
+
+The letters of Keats did not attract much notice till long after those
+of Byron, and no short time after those of Shelley, had secured it. This
+was by no means wholly, though it may have been to some extent
+indirectly, due to the partly stupid and partly malevolent attempts to
+smother his poetical reputation in its cradle. The letters were
+inaccessible till the late Lord Houghton practically resuscitated Keats;
+and till other persons--rather in the "Codlin not Short" manner--rushed
+in to correct and supplement Mr. Milnes as he then was. And it was even
+much later still before two very different editors, Sir Sidney Colvin
+and the late Mr. Buxton Forman, completed, or nearly so, the
+publication. Something must be said and may be touched on later in
+connection with a very important division of our subject in general, as
+to the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny Brawne:
+but nothing in detail need be written, and it is almost needless to say
+that none of these letters will appear here. No one but a brute who is
+also something of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing
+them. A thought of _sunt lacrimae rerum_ is all the price that need be
+paid by any one who chooses to read them, nor is it our business to
+characterise at length the taste and wits of the person who could
+publish them.[28]
+
+But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that for some
+years past there has been a tendency to value the Letters as a whole
+very highly. Not only has unusual critical power been claimed for Keats
+on the strength of them, but general epistolary merit; and though
+nobody, so far as one knows, has yet paralleled the absurdity above
+mentioned in the case of Shelley, Keats has been taken by some
+credit-worthy judges as an unusually strong witness to the truth of the
+proposition already adopted here, that poets are good letter-writers.
+
+He certainly is no exception to the rule; but to what exact extent he
+exemplifies it may not be a matter to be settled quite off hand. There
+is no doubt that at his best Keats is excellent in this way, and that
+best is perhaps to be found with greatest certainty, by anyone who
+wants to dip before plunging, in the letters to his brother and
+sister-in-law, George and Georgiana. Those to his little sister Fanny
+are also charming in their way, though the peculiar and very happy
+mixture of life and literature to be found in the others does not, of
+course, occur in them. His letters of description, to whomsoever
+written, are, as one might expect, first-rate; and the very late
+specimen--one of his very last to anyone--to _Mrs._ not Miss Brawne is
+as brave as it is touching. As for the criticism, there are undoubtedly
+(as again we should expect from the author of the wonderful preface to
+_Endymion_) invaluable remarks--the inspiration of poetical practice
+turned into formulas of poetical theory. On the other hand, the famous
+advice to Shelley to "be more of an artist and load every rift with
+ore"--Shelley whose art transcends artistry and whose substance is as
+the unbroken nugget gold, so that there are no rifts in it to load--is,
+even when one remembers how often poets misunderstand each other,[29]
+rather "cold water to the back" of admiration.
+
+It may, however, not unfairly introduce a very few considerations on the
+side of Keats's letters which is not so good. All but idolaters
+acknowledge a certain boyishness in him--a boyishness which is in fact
+no mean source contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not
+always quite so charming in prose, and especially in letters. You do not
+want self-criticism of an obviously second-thought kind in them. But you
+do want that less obtrusive variety which prevents them from appearing
+unkempt, "down-at-heel" etc. Perhaps there is, at any rate in the
+earlier letters, something of this unkemptness in Keats as an epistoler.
+
+A hasty person may say "What! do you venture to quarrel with letters
+where, side by side with agreeable miscellaneous details, you may
+suddenly come upon the original and virgin text of 'La Belle Dame sans
+Merci'?" Most certainly not. Such a find, or one ten times less
+precious, would make one put up with accompaniments much more than ten
+times worse than the worst of Keats's letters. But it may be observed
+that the objection is only a fresh example of the unfortunate
+tendency[30] of mankind to "ignore elenchs" as the logicians say, or, as
+less pedantic phraseology has it, to talk beside the question. A man
+might put a thousand pound note (and you might spend many thousand pound
+notes without buying anything like the poem just mentioned) in a coarse,
+vulgar, trivial or in other ways objectionable letter. The note would be
+most welcome in itself, but it would not improve the quality of its
+covering epistle. Not, of course, that Keats's letters are coarse or
+vulgar, though they are sometimes rather trivial. But the point is that
+their excellency, _as_ letters, does not depend on their enclosures (as
+we may call them) or even directly on their importance as biography
+which is certainly consummate. Are they good letters as such, and of how
+much goodness? Have they been presented as letters should be presented
+for reading? These are points on which, considering the title and range
+of this Introduction, it may not be improper to offer a few
+observations. We have already ventured to suggest that, if not the "be
+all and end all," at any rate the quality to be first enquired into as
+to its presence or its absence in letters, is "naturalness." And we have
+said something as to the propriety or impropriety of different modes of
+editing and publishing them. The present division of the subject seems
+to afford a specially good text for adding something more on both these
+matters.
+
+As to the first point, the text is specially good because of the
+position of Keats in the most remarkable group in which we have rather
+found than placed him. To the present writer, as a reader, it seems, as
+has been already said whether justly or unjustly, that the element of
+"naturalness"--it is an ugly word, and French has no better, in fact
+none at all: though German is a little luckier with _natürlichkeit_ and
+Spanish much with _naturaleza_--is rather conspicuously deficient in
+Byron. In Shelley it is pre-eminent, and can only be missed by those who
+have no kindred touch of the nature which it reflects. Shelley could be
+vague, unpractical, mystical; he could sometimes be just a little silly;
+but it was no more possible for him to be affected, or to make those
+slips of taste which are a sort of _minus_ corresponding to the _plus_
+of affectation, than it was (after _Queen Mab_ at least) to write
+anything that was not poetry. Thus in addition to the literary
+perfection of his letters, they have the _sine qua non_ of naturalness
+in perfection also.
+
+But with Keats things are different. Opinions differ as to whether he
+ever quite reached maturity even in poetry to the extent into which
+Shelley struck straight with _Alastor_, never losing it afterwards, and
+leaving us only to wonder what conceivable accomplishment might have
+even transcended _Adonais_ and its successors. That with all his
+marvellous promise and hardly less marvellous achievement, Keats was
+only reaching maturity when he died has been generally allowed by the
+saner judgments.[31] Now _im_maturity has perhaps its own naturalness
+which is sometimes, and in a way, very charming, but is not the
+naturalness pure and simple of maturity. Children are sometimes, nay
+often, very pretty, agreeable and amusing things: but there comes a time
+when we rather wish they would go to the nursery. Perhaps the
+"sometimes" occurs with Keats's earlier letters if not with his later.
+
+[Sidenote: EDITING OF LETTERS]
+
+He is thus also a text for the second part of our sermon--the duty of
+editors and publishers of correspondence. There is much to be said for
+the view that publication, as it has been put, "is an unpardonable sin,"
+that is to say, that no author (or rather no author's ghost) can justly
+complain if what he once deliberately published is, when all but the
+control of the dead hand is off, republished. _Il l'a voulu_, as the
+famous tag from Molière has it. But letters in the stricter sense--that
+is to say, pieces of private correspondence--are in very different case.
+Not only were they, save in very few instances, never _meant_ for
+publication: but, which is of even more importance, they were never
+_prepared_ for publication.[32] Not only, again, did the writer never
+see them in "proof," much less in "revise," as the technical terms go,
+but he never, so far as we know, exercised on them even the revision
+which all but the most careless authors give before sending their
+manuscripts to the printer. Some people of course do read over their
+letters before sending them: but it must be very rarely and in special,
+not to say dubious, cases that they do this with a view to the thing
+being seen by any other eyes than those of the intended recipient. It is
+therefore to the last degree unfair to plump letters on the market
+unselected and uncastigated. To what length the castigation should
+proceed is of course matter for individual taste and judgment. Nothing
+must be put in--that is clear; but as to what may or should be left out,
+"there's the rub." Perhaps the best criterion, though it may be admitted
+to be not very easy of application, is "Would the author, in publishing,
+have left it out or not?" Sometimes this will pass very violent
+expressions of opinion and even sentiments of doubtful morality and
+wisdom. But that it should invariably exclude mere trivialities, faults
+of taste, slovenlinesses of expression, etc., is at least the opinion of
+the present writer. And a "safety razor" of such things might perhaps
+with advantage have been used on Keats's, though he has written nothing
+which is in the least discreditable to him.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. LATER
+
+
+[Sidenote: A NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUP]
+
+Part at least of these general remarks has a very special relevance to
+the rest of our story. There may be differences of respectable opinion
+as to the system of editing just advocated; but they will hardly concern
+one point--that the susceptibilities of living persons must be
+considered. To some extent indeed this is a mere counsel of selfish
+prudence: for an editor who neglects it may get himself into serious
+difficulties. Even where such danger does not exist, or might perhaps be
+disregarded, it is impossible for any decent person to run the risk of
+needlessly offending others. It will be seen at once that this
+introduces a new matter for consideration in regard to most--practically
+all--of the correspondences which we have still to survey. Even those
+just discussed have only recently passed from under its range. Shelley's
+son died not so very long ago: grandchildren of Byron much more
+recently; and if Keats had lived to the ordinary age of man and had, as
+he very likely would have done, married not Fanny Brawne, but somebody
+else later, a son or daughter of his (daughters are particularly and
+sometimes inconveniently loyal to their deceased parents) might be alive
+and flourishing now. As this constraint extends not merely to the
+families of the writers but to those of persons mentioned by them (not
+to speak of these persons themselves in the most recent cases), it
+exercises, as will at once be seen, a most wide-ranging cramp and brake
+upon publication. Blunders are occasionally made of course: the most
+remarkable in recent times was probably an oversight of the editor of
+Edward FitzGerald's letters, than which hardly any more interesting
+exist among those yet to be noticed. FitzGerald, quite innocently and
+without the slightest personal malevolence but thinking only of Mrs.
+Browning's work, had expressed himself (as anybody might in a private
+letter) to the effect that perhaps we need not be sorry for her death.
+Unfortunately the letter was published while her husband was still
+alive: and many people must remember the very natural and excusable, but
+somewhat excessive and undignified, explosion which followed on his
+part.
+
+Such things must of course be avoided at all costs; and the consequence
+is that nineteenth century letters must frequently--in fact with rare if
+any exceptions--have appeared in a condition of expurgation which cannot
+but have affected their spirit and savour to a very considerable extent.
+It is for instance understood that Mr. Matthew Arnold's were very
+severely censored; and, while readily believing this and acquiescing in
+its probable propriety, the old Adam in some readers may be unable to
+refrain from regret.
+
+Again, there is something to be said about the less good effects of that
+"Life-and-Letters" system which has been quite rightly welcomed and
+praised for its better ones. Drawing on the Letters--with good material
+to work on and good skill in the worker--improves the Life enormously;
+but it is by no means certain--indeed it has been hinted already--that
+the Letters themselves do not to a certain extent lose by it. Indeed
+from one point of view, the word "loss" may be used in its most literal
+meaning. The compiler of one very famous biography was said, for
+instance, to have--with a disregard of the value of letters as
+autographs which was magnificent perhaps in one way but far from "the
+game" in others--cut up the actual sheets and pasted the pieces on his
+manuscript, sending the whole to the printers and chancing the survival
+even of what was sent, when it came back with the proofs.
+
+But there is another sense of "loss" which has also to be reckoned. The
+framework of biography is, or at least ought to be, something more than
+a mere frame: and it distracts attention from the letters themselves,
+breaks up their continuous effect, and in many cases necessitates at
+least occasional omission of parts which an editor of them by themselves
+would not think of excluding. Of course this is no argument against the
+plan as such: but it has, together with what was said recently, to be
+taken into account when we compare the epistolary position of the last
+century with that of its immediate predecessor.[33]
+
+These remarks are made not in the least by way of depreciating or even
+making an apology for nineteenth century letters, but only in order to
+put the reader in a proper state for critical estimation of them. Nor is
+it necessary to repeat--still less to discuss--the more general
+lamentations with some reference to which we started as to any decay of
+letter-writing. Provisos and warnings may be taken as having been made
+sufficiently: and we pass to the actual survey.
+
+It may have been noticed in reference to the principal group of
+letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the exception of Cowper,
+they were all acquainted with each other. Walpole knew Lady Mary,
+Chesterfield and Gray; while Gray, if he did not know the other two,
+knew Walpole very well indeed. Something of the same sort might be
+contended for among those whom we have selected on the bridge of the
+eighteenth and nineteenth. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Lamb were
+of course intimately connected: Southey knew Landor and Shelley, Keats
+knew Shelley, Wordsworth and Lamb; while Byron and Shelley, however
+unequally, were pretty closely yoked together. It is not meant that in
+all these groups everybody wrote to each other; but that the writing
+faculty was curiously prominent--diffused like a kind of atmosphere--in
+all. Now if we look in the nineteenth for such a group it will be found
+perhaps less readily. But one such at least certainly exists, to wit
+that which includes Tennyson, Thackeray, Edward FitzGerald, Carlyle and
+his wife, Fanny Kemble, Sterling and one or two more. There are of
+course numerous others outside this group, and even in it Tennyson
+himself is not a very remarkable letter-writer, any more than his great
+rival, Browning, was. But there was the same diffusion of the
+letter-writing spirit which has been noticed above, and Thackeray,
+FitzGerald, the Carlyles, and perhaps Fanny Kemble are quite of the
+greater clans among our peculiar people.
+
+The most remarkable of all these--and as it seems to the present writer,
+one of the most remarkable of all English letter-writers is one whose
+letters have never been collected,[34] and from whom, until
+comparatively lately, we had only few and as it were accidental
+specimens. It is hoped that, notwithstanding the great changes of taste
+recently as to reticence or indiscretion, there are still many people
+who can not only understand but thoroughly sympathise with Thackeray's
+disgust at the idea of having his "Life" written; and the even greater
+reluctance which he would certainly have felt at that of having his
+letters published. But, as has been suggested on a former occasion, when
+things _are_ published there is nothing disgraceful in reading them: and
+it may be frankly admitted that lovers of English literature would have
+missed much pleasure and the opportunity of much admiration if the
+"Brookfield" letters, those to the Baxter family and others in America,
+those finally included in the "Biographical" edition, and yet others
+which have turned up sporadically had remained unknown. It may be
+doubted whether there is anything like them in our literature--if indeed
+there is in any other--for the double, treble or even more complicated
+gift of view into character, matter of interest, positive literary
+satisfaction, and (perhaps most remarkable of all) resemblance to and
+explanation of the author's "regular literature," as it has been called.
+In some respects they resemble the letters of Keats; but there is absent
+from them the immaturity which was noted in those, and which extended to
+both matter and style. They are more various in subject and tone than
+Shelley's. They are not deliberately quaint like Lamb's; and they
+naturally lack (whether this is wholly an advantage or not, may admit,
+though not here, of dispute) the restraint[35] which, in greater or less
+degree and in varied kind, characterizes the great eighteenth century
+epistolers.
+
+[Sidenote: THACKERAY]
+
+One additional charm which many of them possess may be regarded by
+extreme precisians as of doubtful legitimacy as far as comment here is
+concerned: but this may be ruled out as a superfluous scruple. It is the
+illumination of the text "by the author's own candles" as he himself
+says in a well-known Introduction: the actual "illustration" by
+insertion in the script, of little pen-drawings. The shortcomings of
+Thackeray's draughtsmanship have always been admitted: and by nobody
+more frankly than by himself. But they hardly affect this sort of
+"picturing" at all. The unfortunate inability to depict a pretty face
+which he deplored need do no harm whatever: and his lack of
+"composition" not much. A spice of caricature is almost invariably
+admissible in such things: and the same tricksy spirit which prompted
+the hundreds of initials, _culs-de-lampe_ etc. contributed by him to
+_Punch_ and to be found collected in the "Oxford" edition of his works,
+was most happily at hand for use in letters. Some years ago there
+appeared, in a catalogue of autographs for sale, an extract of text and
+cut which was irresistibly funny. The author and designer had had a
+mishap by slipping on that peculiarly treacherous suddenly frozen rain
+for which (though we are liable enough to it in England and though some
+living have seen the entire Strand turned into one huge pantomime
+scene, roars of laughter included, as people came out of theatres) we
+have no special name. (The French, in whose capital it is said to be
+even more frequent, call it _verglas_.) In telling it he had drawn
+himself sitting (as involuntarily though one hopes not so eternally as
+_infelix Theseus_) with arms, legs, hat, etcetera in disorder suitable
+to the occasion and with a facial expression of the most ludicrous
+dismay. It can hardly have taken a dozen strokes of the pen: but they
+simply glorified the letter.
+
+In no sense, however, can the value and delight of Thackeray's letters
+be said to depend upon this _bonus_ of illustration. Without it they
+would be among the most noteworthy and the most delectable of their
+kind. One sees in them the "first state" of that extraordinary glancing
+at all sorts of side-views, possible objections and comments on "what
+the other fellow thinks," which is the main secret in his published
+writings. If the view of him as a "sentimentalist" (which nobody, unless
+it is taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened by them,
+that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed so long, of his
+"cynicism" is utterly destroyed. We see the variety of his interests;
+the keenness of his sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity
+of the changes in his mood and thought. And through the whole there runs
+the wonderful style which was so long unrecognised--nay, which those who
+go by the trumpery machine-made rules of "composition books" used
+gravely to stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many (though
+not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication which have been
+discussed and advocated above: and it will probably be possible some day
+for posterity to possess, not only a collected body of the now scattered
+Thackeray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared
+even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our
+Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any previous occupant
+of those shelves: and one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar
+sense, the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For it will
+be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of its author's own--a
+_William Makepeace Thackeray_ in the familiar novel-form of title, and
+in the old Richardsonian form of contents--but oh! how different from
+anything of Richardson's save that it might possibly make you hang
+yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but because you
+had come to the end of it.
+
+[Sidenote: FITZGERALD]
+
+If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less complete
+presentation, already existing, of nineteenth century "Letters" in a
+body by a single writer, the palm must probably be given to those
+(already referred to) of the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayyàm.
+Besides their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy, they
+have, for anyone studying the subject as we are endeavouring to do, a
+curious attraction of comparison. Letter-writing, though by no means
+exclusively, would appear to be specially and peculiarly the _forte_ of
+men who live somewhat special and peculiar lives--men without the
+ordinary family ties of wife and children--sometimes though by no means
+always, recluses; possibly to some extent "originals," "humourists,"
+"eccentrics," as they have been called at different times and from
+different points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society,
+belongs to the class after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield[36] and
+Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later period Lamb, are eminently
+of it. But hardly anyone so unquestionably comes under the
+classification as Edward FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time
+married, but that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it
+was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual cohabitation
+lasted but a short time. He had no children, and though he frequently
+foregathered with the family from which he sprang, he was essentially a
+"solitary." Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise
+themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the
+author of _Jacopo Ortis_, naturally enough find in letters the outlet
+for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in
+conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in
+society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent
+letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy,
+and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that
+the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their letters
+usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the others.
+
+Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have
+had more than the author of _Euphranor_ and (as we have had to say
+before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of
+Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in
+this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most
+strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly[38] disputed question how
+much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly
+be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his
+versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does
+concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous
+exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not
+dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the
+spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both
+being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong
+nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great
+translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his
+scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in
+his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English
+Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even
+if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable
+fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and
+Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence
+over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was
+unmistakably such an _aura_ or atmosphere about in Trinity College,
+Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties
+of the nineteenth century--a spirit of literature and humour, of
+seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry--which
+produced things as diverse as _The Dying Swan_ and Clarke's _Library of
+Useless Knowledge_, _Vanity Fair_ and the English _Rubaiyàt_.
+
+Of this curiously blended mood-combination--of which in their different
+ways Tennyson and Thackeray, as universally known, Brookfield, W. B.
+Donne, G. S. Venables, as less known, but noteworthy instances suggest
+themselves as examples--FitzGerald was certainly not the least
+remarkable. He had, as eccentrics usually and almost necessarily have,
+not a few limitations, some of which possibly were, though others
+certainly were not, deliberately assumed or accepted. He would not allow
+that Tennyson had ever in his later work (not latest by any means) done
+anything so good as his earlier. In that unlucky though quite blameless
+observation on Mrs. Browning which was referred to above, he ignored or
+showed himself unable to appreciate the fact that the poetess had never
+done anything better than, if anything so good as, some of her very
+latest work.[40] It cannot be considered an entirely adequate cause for
+ceasing to live with your wife,[41] that her dresses rustle; and many
+other instances of what may be called practical and literary
+_non-sequiturs_ might be alleged against him. But all these
+"queernesses" are evidence of a temperament and a mode of thinking which
+are likely to produce very satisfactory letters. They are sure not to be
+dull: and when the queerness is accompanied by such literary power as
+"Fitz" possessed they are not likely to be merely silly, as some things
+are which attempt not to be dull. As a matter of fact they are
+delightful: and their variety is astonishing. Odd stories and odd
+experiences seem, despite his almost claustral life, to have had a habit
+of flying to FitzGerald like filings to a magnet--as for instance the
+irresistible anecdote of the parish clerk who insisted on giving out for
+singing casual remarks of the parson above him as if they were verses of
+a hymn, and who was duly echoed by the congregation. Even when he does
+not make you laugh he satisfies you: even when you do not agree with him
+you are obliged to him for having expressed his heresy.
+
+[Sidenote: FANNY KEMBLE]
+
+One of FitzGerald's special correspondents was, for reasons then
+imperative, not a member of the Cambridge group itself, but as closely
+connected with it as possible: being the sister of one of its actual
+members. John M. Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon
+scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far
+as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed
+these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson
+incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances
+(invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called
+"Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and
+with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be
+hers by inheritance,[43] she married an American planter with even worse
+results (they were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald's
+marriage brought about later: and for many years returned to public
+life, not as an actress but as a reader. She wrote and published both
+prose and verse of various kinds: but her best known work and that which
+places her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much of
+which is composed of actual letters, while practically the whole of it
+is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has perhaps been published
+_too_ voluminously: and it is certain that, as indeed one might expect,
+its parts are not equal in interest. But experienced and balanced
+judgment must always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and
+even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps never quite
+happily or fully developed. Merely as a person she seems to have
+exercised an extraordinary attraction without being exactly amiable[44]:
+and from the intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have
+nothing here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what has
+sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated," "not
+brought off," etc., but of extraordinary capacity.
+
+This may have had something to do with her sudden and exceptional
+success, when at barely twenty, and with no training except what
+heredity might give her, she "took the town [and the country] by storm"
+as Juliet, and very soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her
+"records" of these and other things are of almost the first quality: and
+this power of "recording" continued and was perhaps stimulated by the
+less as well as the more fortunate events of her life. It may be said
+indeed that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five and
+twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still more unusual wits,
+had no business to marry a planter in the Southern States, knowing that
+she was to live there, unless she had reconciled herself to the
+institution of slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this. But
+the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave occasion to some
+very remarkable "recording," and the same had been the case earlier with
+her life, whether at home, on the stage, or in society, and was the case
+later whether she lived in England, in the Northern States, or on the
+Continent of Europe. Perhaps you never exactly like her: an unusual
+experience in the reading of letters, which for the most part are
+singularly reconciling from the mere fact of their explanatory quality.
+There is indeed no better confirmation of the well-known French saying
+_tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_. Here, however, there are, as
+elsewhere, exceptions--Gray being perhaps one[45] as our present subject
+is another. But there are few things more interesting, though their
+interest may be somewhat tragic, than the spectacle of the way "things
+go wrong" so easily, so finally, so fatally. Fanny Kemble had a sister
+Adelaide, afterwards Mrs. Sartoris, with whom everything appears to have
+gone right: but with herself it "seemed otherwise to the Gods." And her
+letters or memoirs, or whatever they are to be called, are the record
+thereof, as well as of other things.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CARLYLES]
+
+The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband and wife,
+according to the inevitable misfortune attending so much of our
+subject--supplied the occasion of volumes of that disgusting and most
+idle controversy which has made many people of taste pray that nothing
+biographical may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to take
+part in a game which if it does not always, like the unpleasant
+personage in the old ballad,
+
+    Come for ill and never for good,
+
+certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the latter purpose
+and result. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_ is--once more and as so often--the
+best and the sufficient observation. But there remains in the letters of
+both, and especially in those of the lady, plenty of wholesome interest
+and of justifiable--not spying or eavesdropping--information as to
+character. Judged comparatively, they certainly do not contradict the
+notion formerly referred to, that in some respects letter-writing is a
+specially feminine gift. Carlyle's own letters[46] have plenty of merit
+and attraction--some of the descriptive ones especially: and they
+demonstrate, in the infallible way which letters and letters alone can
+supply in the absence of long personal familiarity, that the general
+tone and key of his writings was no falsetto but a perfectly genuine
+thing--that the often urged contrast of the _Life of Schiller_, instead
+of evidencing affectation in the later work, only proves constraint in
+the earlier. At the same time, except for what may be called
+side-illustration of the works, and completion of the biography for
+those who want it, there is not very much in Carlyle's letters which
+would be a serious loss.
+
+With his wife the case is different. Without her "Letters and Memorials"
+we might (it is rather improbable that we _should_, owing to the
+misdemeanours of more persons than one and the blow-fly appetite of a
+part of the public for sore places) have escaped a good deal of the
+ignoble wrangling above referred to. But we should not only have failed
+to appreciate a very remarkable character, but have missed some of the
+very best of our now existing contributions to epistolary literature.
+Personally Mrs. Carlyle was by no means a general favourite. She had a
+fearfully sharp tongue, and a still sharper wit in directing it upon her
+victims; her experiences were not very likely to edulcorate her acids
+and mollify her asperities. The letters show that, as so often happens,
+there was plenty of sweetness within the sharp exterior, and that her
+strength was the strength of passion, not of obduracy. But this is not
+all. There might have been biographical whitewashing of this kind
+without much gain to pure literature. But the letters showed likewise a
+power of expression, both lighter and more serious, which is hardly
+inferior to that found in any correspondence of man or woman, genuine or
+fictitious. Some people, not given to rash superlatives and pretty
+extensively acquainted with literature, have held that the letter
+describing her visit after many years to Haddington, and the
+reminiscences it called forth, has no superior in the vast range of our
+subject for pure pathos perfectly expressed, without constraint on
+nature yet without loss of dignity.[47] On the other hand, the half
+comic accounts of her domestic troubles etc. are worthy of Fielding or
+Thackeray. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle possessed what is rare in
+women--humour. And she exemplified, as few other women and not so very
+many men have done, Anne Evans's matchless definition of it as "thinking
+in jest while feeling in earnest." Moreover while, as all true
+humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when necessary, she
+could, as is the case with them likewise, never quite discard the
+earnest.
+
+[Sidenote: MACAULAY AND DICKENS]
+
+Some of the most distinguished of Carlyle's contemporaries, the great
+men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, have left letters more or
+less copious and more or less valuable from one or both of the two
+sides, biographical and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay's
+letters and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been
+excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the rather boisterous
+"cocksureness" of the published writings: and help his few but very
+remarkable poems other than the _Lays_ (which are excellent but in a
+different kind) to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his
+mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically very capital. So
+also in Dickens's case the "Life-and-Letters" system is excellently
+justified, but one does not know that the letters in themselves would
+always deserve a first class in this particular school of _Literae
+Humaniores_. Letter-writing admits--if it may not even require--a
+certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French call an _Egoisme
+à plusieurs_--a temper which takes, if only for the moment, other people
+into itself and cares for them there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too
+generally thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fictitious
+creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr. Toots, he could
+have written some letters to or from _them_ it would have been a very
+different thing. In this respect he does not, as in others he does,
+resemble Balzac, whose egotism was in a way as intense as his own and
+like it extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while the
+contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in other cases from
+this same point of view. At the same time it must not be supposed that
+there is any intention here of belittling Dickens, either as a
+letter-writer or in any other way. It is only suggested that he lacks
+one of the things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his most
+noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial criticisms--rather
+limited in taste and purview, but singularly shrewd within other limits.
+And many of the others tell their substance with that faculty of
+"telling" which he possessed as few have ever done, while the comedy of
+those given here is "the true Dickens."
+
+[Sidenote: SOME NOVELISTS]
+
+Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and French) of the
+mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests the rest of a class so
+predominant in that century's literary production. Their record in the
+matter is rather chequered, for reasons, in some respects and cases at
+any rate, not difficult to discover. Reference is elsewhere made to the
+disappointment experienced (perhaps not too reasonably) by some readers
+of the letters of George Eliot. A not dissimilar feeling had been
+expressed earlier in regard to those of Miss Austen: which, however,
+were intrinsically far superior. Except to her sister, and it may be
+even to her, Jane Austen was not at all likely to indulge in what is
+called in French _épanchement_: it was not in the least her line,
+whether in writing for publication or otherwise. Only one full year
+passed between the death of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and
+the two illustrated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably
+accurate idea that when one human being dies another is born to succeed
+him or her in their special functions. But, as in other respects, they
+differed here remarkably; and though in neither case was the nature of
+the writer exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very
+differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if she had chosen,
+(she has done something like it as it is) have written most delightful
+letters. A hundred scenes in the novels from Catherine Morland's tremors
+and trials, or John Dashwood's progressive limitations of generosity for
+his sisters, to some of the best things in _Persuasion_, would take
+letter form with the happiest results. But she did not choose that it
+should be so. George Eliot, on the other hand, after her earlier days,
+had ensconced herself in such a chrysalis of quasi-philosophical and
+quasi-scientific thought and speech that she could hardly have recovered
+the freedom of expression which is almost the soul of letter-writing.
+
+Some of Bulwer's (the first Lord Lytton's) letters are remarkable in
+ways, especially that of literary criticism, which might hardly be
+expected by anyone who had insufficiently taken the measure of his
+strangely unequal and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as
+the century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the enormous
+professional production which began to be customary with
+novelists--principally tempted no doubt by the corresponding gain of
+money, but perhaps also by the nobler desire of increasing, or at least
+living up to, their reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery
+which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time,
+to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to
+morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year--and
+those not the cock-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the
+old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions--could leave little time or
+inclination for extensive letter-writing. There were, however, some
+exceptions. Charles Kingsley--who, though his novels were not very
+numerous, supplemented them with all sorts of miscellaneous writing for
+publication, was a diligent sportsman, an active cleric, and a busy man
+in many kinds and ways--wrote certainly good and probably many letters.
+The two brighter stars in the Brontë constellation, especially
+Charlotte, were scarcely less remarkable with the pen in this way than
+in others: and Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, has been put high
+by some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade showed itself
+here as elsewhere[48]: and others might be mentioned.[49] But perhaps
+the most distinguished novelist next to Thackeray of the nineteenth
+century, who was also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who
+died in middle age not long before its end--Robert Louis Stevenson.
+
+[Sidenote: STEVENSON]
+
+Stevenson had in fact practically all the qualifications necessary for a
+good practitioner of our art. He had, eminently, that gift which the
+Romans called _facundia_ and the French can translate, if with a slight
+degradation of meaning, by _faconde_; but for which we, though the
+adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess no noun,
+"Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine" writing or speaking.
+"Facility of expression" perhaps comes nearest. Whether he corrected or
+corrupted this native gift by his famous "sedulous aping" of stylists
+before him is a debated question: but one quite unnecessary to touch
+here. It is sufficient to say that he never aped anyone in his letters,
+unless playfully and in a sort of concert with his correspondent. Indeed
+he possessed, quintessentially, that "naturalness" of matter and form on
+which so much stress has been laid. He had a disposition equally
+favourable to the business--if business we may call it. A person who is
+habitually gloomy may write capital letters of an impressive character
+now and then: but is likely to produce little but boredom if he extends
+his practice. Louis Stevenson did not habitually "regard the world
+through a horse collar" (as it was once put), but he certainly did not
+pass through it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his
+eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes under no small
+difficulties, he had very little if any of that _collar_-work--that
+grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of
+all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of
+scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without
+being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will,"
+and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to _get_ out
+of ruts, _kept_ out of them without the least trouble. He was as little
+of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a
+drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good
+letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold
+his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great
+pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his
+to myself as a sort of _bonus_ to the reader of this little book--a
+letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other respects.
+
+At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed had best, stop:
+not merely because space is closing in. Lovers of letters will of course
+detect what seem to them omissions in what has gone before and what
+comes after. Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
+Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon and
+Newman--the latter not merely for his re-statement of the
+character-value of correspondence, but for his exemplifications of
+it--might certainly have been more fully noticed. But in regard to later
+writers there are several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be
+easy to speak on account of their own lives being too recent: in regard
+of nearly all the same fact must have occasioned exercise of
+"censorship" to a degree which makes absolute judgment of their
+competence as epistolers rash, and comparative judgment almost
+impossible. To take up once more one example of men who were born a full
+or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,[50] speaking apparently with
+intimate knowledge of the originals, speaks also of the "severe process
+of excision and retrenchment to which these [_the letters of Mr. Matthew
+Arnold_] have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters "could
+have endured" it. Those who remember the appearance of these letters
+will also remember that some critics doubted whether even "these" had
+exactly "endured it"--that is to say, whether the expected salt of the
+author of so much published _persiflage_ had not been left out or had
+singularly lost its savour. To take another from the next generation, it
+is pretty certain that Mr. Swinburne's letters, though we have judicious
+selections from them, must have needed much more excision or
+retrenchment than Mr. Arnold's, unless he wrote them in a manner
+remarkably different both from his conversation and from his published
+works. In such cases it is best, the evidence being not fully before us,
+not to anticipate either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER
+
+
+A few more general remarks, however, on _kinds_ of letter-writing--as
+distinguished from personality and accomplishment of letter-writers--may
+not improperly be added.
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS AND THE NOVEL]
+
+One extremely curious application of the Letter has not yet been
+noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is the way in which--when
+after birth-struggles for some two thousand years the novel at last got
+itself born--letter-writing was pressed into its service. Historically,
+as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may connect
+Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest the connection as the
+origin of the "novel-in-letters." In the romance proper--that is to say
+that of the Middle Ages--letters do not play any very important part,
+just as they played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the
+late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries they play a
+much larger--partly no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of
+the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency
+and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need
+not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in
+seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form:
+nor need we even put down to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well
+as at home, the very general further adoption and continuance of a form
+which has perhaps more to be said against it than for it. Most serious
+students of the history of prose fiction must have noticed, and some of
+them have already pointed out, the curious, rather naïf, but quite
+obvious feeling on the part of the earlier practitioners of such fiction
+that somebody might ask them, in more polite language than that in which
+Cardinal Ippolito d'Este asked Ariosto a similar question, "Where they
+got their stories from?" The feeling seems sometimes to have affected
+poets, but much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and
+confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination. Of the
+unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices invented to answer this
+inconvenient question Scott in one well-known passage,[51] and others
+elsewhere, have made ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of
+Miss Austen's satiric touches is the passage where Catherine Morland
+expects palpitating interest from a bundle of washing-bills in a
+wardrobe-cupboard. But the anticipation of such a question, though
+perhaps it became conventional before it disappeared altogether, was
+certainly at one time real.
+
+At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson--Father of English
+novels as he is with whatever justice called--and by that overmastering
+fancy for letter-writing itself, which, as should have been already made
+clear, affected the century in which English novels were born--the
+practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was too perfect an artist
+in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne
+himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would
+not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But
+Smollett's best, _Humphrey Clinker_, adopts the method, and is perhaps
+one of its most successful examples. It suited the author's preference
+for a succession of scenes rather than a connected plot; for the sharp
+presentation of "humours" in character and incident. And it continued to
+be practised both early in the nineteenth century--examples had swarmed
+at the end of the eighteenth--and later. _Redgauntlet_ (which some have
+thought one of the best of Scott's novels and which few good judges
+would put much lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not
+wholly. And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters and
+narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale. It is a sort
+of confession of what certainly is the fact--that the novel entirely by
+letters is a clumsy device, constantly getting in the way of the
+"story." Indeed the method of _Redgauntlet_ is a kind of retreat to the
+elder and more modern--one may say the more artistic and rational--plan
+of _introducing_ letters, but only occasionally as auxiliaries to, and
+as it were illustrations of, the actual narrative, not as substitutes
+for, or at any rate main constituents of, it.[52] Indeed, in order to
+make a novel wholly composed of letters thoroughly and absorbingly
+attractive, either charm of style such as to make the kind of literature
+in which it appears, more or less indifferent; or passion which is more
+suitable to poetry or drama than to prose; or both, may seem
+unnecessary.
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS AND BIOGRAPHY]
+
+It was also in the eighteenth century--_the_ century once more of
+letter-writing--that letters, this time genuine not fictitious, began
+to play, to an important extent, a subsidiary part in yet another
+department of literature--biography. They had always done so, of course,
+to an extent less important in History, of which Biography is really a
+subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius
+quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could
+be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about
+him--even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of
+the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes
+of lightning through the dark of history. But the credit of using
+letters as a main constituent of biography--of originating the
+"Life-and-Letters" class of books which fills so large a part of modern
+library-shelves--has been given, as far as English is concerned, to
+Mason in his dealings with Gray. There is so little to be said in favour
+of Mason, that we need not enquire too narrowly into his right to this
+commendation: though critical conscience must be appeased by adding that
+he abused his privilege as an editor and "literary executor" by garbling
+unblushingly. Boswell did Mason honour by acknowledging his example, and
+much more also by following it; and this practically settled the matter.
+Except in short pieces, which had need be of special excellence like
+Carlyle's _Sterling_, the plan has always been followed since: and there
+can here at least be no question that with a little favour of
+circumstances, it is the best plan possible. You get, as has been said,
+your character at first hand; if the letters include epistles to as well
+as from him or her, you get invaluable side-lights; you get, except in
+cases of wilful deception or great carelessness, the most trustworthy
+accounts of fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the man
+talking.
+
+At the same time it must be admitted that this "Life-and-Letters"
+scheme, like every kind of art, requires care: and like most human
+things, is exposed to dangers and difficulties in addition to some
+previously noticed. To begin with, the _quality_ of the letters has to
+be considered. It so happened that Mason, the originator by courtesy,
+had unusually good material to work with. Gray, as is above pointed out
+and as is also, with some provisos already made or very soon to be made,
+universally admitted, is one of our best letter-writers. But not
+everybody--not every considerable man or woman of letters even--can
+write good letters.
+
+And besides this--besides the temptation to rely on the letters and
+merely to print them whether they deserve it or not--there is the
+further difficulty--to judge by the scarcity of good biographies a very
+great and insistent one--of composing the framework of the biography
+itself so as to suit the letters--to give the apples of gold in a
+picture not too obviously composed of some metal baser than silver.
+Unless this is done it would be better simply to "calendar" the letters
+themselves, with the barest schedule of dates and facts to assist the
+comprehension of them. But to consider the different methods of doing
+this--still more of presenting letters apart from deliberate
+biographical intention--would lead us too far. Carlyle's _Cromwell_--the
+presentation of an extraordinarily difficult set of documents not merely
+with connecting narrative, but with a complete explanatory commentary
+including paraphrase, is as remarkable an achievement as, and a far more
+elaborate one than, his _Sterling_ in the way of biography pure and
+simple. It is perhaps, though less delectable, not less admirable in its
+style than the other in its own. But it has, of course, the drawback of
+carrying with it a distinctly controversial character and, indeed,
+intention. We have more recently had at least two examples of the
+fullest possible comment with the least possible controversy in Mr.
+Tovey's "Gray," and of less voluminous but excellently adequate editing
+in Mrs. Toynbee's "Walpole."
+
+[Sidenote: "LETTERS FROM UNKNOWNS"]
+
+One not very large, but extremely curious division of letter-writing
+closely connected with those most recently mentioned, invites if it does
+not insist upon a word or two. Many people--almost all who have happened
+to be at any time "in the lime-light" as a modern phrase goes--that is
+to say in positions of publicity--must have had experience of the
+strange appetite of their fellow-creatures for writing them letters
+without previous acquaintance, without excuse of introduction, and on
+the most flimsy pretexts of occasion. The present writer once received
+from Australia a long list of queries on a book of his--most if not all
+of which could have been answered from the ordinary reference-bookshelf
+in the writing-room of such a club as that--never mind whether it was in
+Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide--from which the querist dated his
+epistle. Indeed, on another occasion somebody demanded a catalogue of
+"the important references to the medical profession in French
+literature"! This tendency of humanity sometimes exercises and magnifies
+itself into really remarkable correspondences. There is perhaps none
+such in English quite to match those _Lettres à une Inconnue_ which
+(after standing the brunt of not a little unfavourable criticism,
+provoked not so much by their contents as by the personal, political,
+and above all religious or anti-religious idiosyncrasy of their author,
+Prosper Mérimée) have taken their place, for good and all, among the
+classics of the art. Our most curious example perhaps is to be found in
+the _Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Miss J._, the genuineness of
+which has been a matter of some controversy, but which are rather more
+inexplicable as forgeries than as authentic documents. Authors, from
+Richardson onwards, have been the special targets of such
+correspondents: and romance reports some, perhaps even history might
+accept a few, instances of the closest relations resulting. On the other
+hand, one of the very best of Miss Edgeworth's too much neglected
+stories, "L'Amie Inconnue" not only may be useful as a warning to the
+too open-hearted but has probably had not a few parallels in fact.
+Generally, of course, the uninvited correspondent is merely a passing
+phenomenon--rarely perhaps welcome except to persons of very much
+self-centred temperament with a good deal of time on their hands;
+tolerated and choked off placably by the good-natured and well-mannered;
+answered snappishly or not answered at all by moroser victims.
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE LETTERS]
+
+There is yet a kind of letter, fictitious or real examples whereof are
+not usually given in books which (as the Articles say of the Apocrypha)
+are to be read "for example of life and instruction of manners," though
+it is in a way the most interesting of all; and that is the love-letter.
+It is, however, so varied in kind and not so very seldom so pre-eminent
+as an illustration of the epistolary ideal--"writing as you would
+talk"--that it would be absurd to say nothing about it in this
+Introduction, and that it may even be possible to give some examples of
+it--one such of Swift's must be given--in the text. Of those which, as
+it was said of one famous group (those of Mlle. de Lespinasse) "burn the
+paper," those of which the Abelard and Heloise collection, with those of
+"The Portuguese Nun," Maria Alcoforado, and Julie de Lespinasse herself
+are the most universally famous--we have two pretty recent collections
+in English from two of the greatest poets and one of the greatest
+poetesses in English of the nineteenth century. They are the letters,
+referred to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the Brownings
+to each other.
+
+There are, it is to be hoped, few people who read such letters (unless
+they are of such a date that Time has exercised his strange power of
+resanctifying desecration and making private property public) without an
+unpleasant consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is another class
+which is not exposed to any such disagreeable liability: and that is the
+very large proportion of love-letters where the amativeness is, so to
+speak, more or less concealed, or where, though scarcely covered with
+the thinnest veil, it is mixed with jest sometimes, jest rather on the
+wrong side of the mouth, perhaps, but jest exercising its usual power of
+embalming. (Salt and sugar both preserve: but in this particular
+instance the danger is of oversweetness already.) There can--or perhaps
+we should say there could, but for some differences of opinion worth
+attending to--be no doubt that Swift owes much to this mixture: and if
+anybody ever undertook a large collection of the best private
+love-letters he would probably find the same seasoning in the best of
+them. For examples in which the actual amatory element is present but as
+it were under-current, like blood that flushes a cheek but does not
+show outside it, some of the best examples are those of Scott to Lady
+Abercorn. Those recently published, and already glanced at, of Disraeli
+to various ladies would seem to be more demonstrative and more
+histrionic. But the section as admitted lies, for us, on the extreme
+border of our province. It is too important to be wholly omitted and
+therefore these paragraphs have been given to it. And it may require
+future touching in reference to some particular writers, especially that
+greatest and most unhappy of all Deans of Saint Patrick, the greatest
+perhaps of all Deans that ever were with the exception of John
+Donne--himself no small epistoler, but greatest in those verse-letters
+which are denied us.[53]
+
+It is perhaps superfluous, but for completeness' sake may be
+permissible, to say a very little about the use of letters for purposes
+other than that of genuine personal communication. Indeed in doing so we
+are only executing the time-honoured manoeuvre of returning to the point
+whence we set out, and bringing the wheel full circle.[54] The strictly
+"business" letter--which is, of course, a personal communication in a
+way--and the "despatch" which is a form of it intended sooner or later
+for more general information, require no notice or at best mere mention.
+But in times past if not also in those present, "Letters" have been
+used--specially perhaps in that century of letters, the eighteenth--for
+purposes of definite instruction, argument, propaganda and so forth.
+There are obvious advantages in the form for certain of the lighter of
+these purposes as it is used in Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_ or
+Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_. But why Bishop Hurd's _Letters on
+Chivalry and Romance_ (really valuable as they are) should have been
+"Letters" at all, except for fashion's sake, it is difficult to say.
+There is perhaps more excuse for the pamphlet, especially the political
+pamphlet, assuming the title of letter as it has so often done in
+instances from the great example of Bolingbroke and Burke downwards.[55]
+You have, with less unreality, the advantage of the classical "speech"
+addressed often to a single person, who is supposed to be specially
+aware of the facts or specially to need instruction and encouragement,
+or modified remonstrance, as to them. It was probably from these great
+exemplars--perhaps also aided by the custom of eighteenth century
+periodicals, that pamphlets of all kinds became titular epistles such as
+"A Letter to the deputy-manager of a Theatre Royal, London, on his
+lately acquired notoriety in contriving and arranging the 'Hair Powder
+Act'" (but this was satire), or "A letter writ by a clergyman to his
+neighbour concerning the kingdom and the allegiance due to the King and
+Queen."[56]
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS TO THE PAPERS]
+
+For a last class may be taken the ever increasing body of things
+"written to the papers." It is unnecessary to consider the justice of a
+sarcastic division of mankind into "those who write to the papers and
+those who do not read the letters," or to discuss what men have been
+heard to say--that the people who write _to_ papers are people who have
+not written _in_ them. It is quite certain that, for many years past,
+the less frivolous kind of newspaper-correspondence has been of admitted
+interest and importance; indeed a paper might conceivably maintain its
+position after its repute has sunk in other ways, simply because more
+letters of importance appear in it than in others. As a source of
+illustrations of how to write and how not to write letters this modern
+development of the art could hardly be quite neglected; and it offers a
+curious study of various kinds. Except with very guileless writers the
+character-index quality is of course less certainly present than in
+letters written _not_ for publication. A man must be, in the old Greek
+phrase, "either a God or a beast," if he does not prepare for print--if
+not exactly with a touch of "stage-fright," at any rate with the
+premeditation with which even stage-fright-free actors go on the stage.
+But it requires a great master or mistress of dissimulation to write
+even these letters at all frequently without a certain amount of
+self-revelation. And there is perhaps no more curious and interesting
+part of that most curious and interesting business of editing than
+(when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered correspondence.
+There is the pure lunatic, such as the man who for years sends
+despatches in a sort of cuneiform cipher, probably quite meaningless and
+certainly not likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive
+person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter quoted above) gives
+his opinion of your paper; the volunteer-corrector of obvious misprints;
+the innocent who merely wants to see his own signature in print, and who
+generally tries to bribe his way into it by references to "your powerful
+journal," etc. They are all there--waiting for the waste-paper basket.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+A few more general remarks may close this Introduction. Something on the
+Art of Letter-writing and also something on its history, especially in
+English, was promised. It is hoped that the promise has not been too
+much falsified, at least to the extent necessary for illustration and
+understanding of the specimens which should follow, and which in their
+turn should illustrate it and make it more intelligible. The History
+part requires little or no postscript; whether ill or well done it
+should pretty well speak for itself. What touches the Art may require
+certain cautions and provisos.
+
+This is especially the case with regard to the stress laid above on
+"naturalness." It is (as the present writer at least believes) the very
+passport of admission to the company of good letter-writers. But it must
+not be misconstrued. It is quite possible that too little care may be
+taken with the matter and style of letters. After all they
+correspond--in a certain, if in the most limited degree--to appearance
+"in company," and require as that does a certain etiquette of
+observance. Complete deshabille[57] on paper is not attractive: and
+there are letters (it is unnecessary to specify any particular
+examples) which somewhat exaggerate "simplicity."
+
+Cowper is perhaps the accepted classic in this style who has the least
+of _apparatus_: but even Cowper bestows a certain amount of
+care--indeed, a very considerable amount--on the dress of his letter's
+body, on the cookery of its provender. If you have only small beer to
+chronicle you can at the worst draw it and froth it and pour it out with
+some gesture. In this respect as in others, while letter-writing has not
+been inaccurately defined or described as the closest to conversation of
+literary forms that do not actually reproduce conversation itself, it
+remains apart from conversation and subject to an additional degree of
+discipline.
+
+[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
+
+Enough should have been said earlier of the opposite fault by excess of
+dressing, which has, however, for a sort of solace the fact that it may
+pass as literature though not exactly as letter-writing. Actually
+beautiful style--not machine-made "fine writing," but that embodiment of
+thought which is a special incarnation of it--is the one thing secure of
+success and survival, whatever literary form it takes. And even short of
+this supreme beauty accomplished literary manner can never be quite
+unwelcome. The highest place in letter-writing has been refused here to
+Pope: and unfortunately there is hardly a division of his work which,
+when you know a little more about it and him, excites more disgust at
+the man's nature. But, at the same time, hardly even his verse convinces
+one more of that extraordinary power of expression as he wished to
+express things which this Alexander, in some ways the infinitely
+Little, possessed. Yet it gives in the first place a rather
+sophisticated enjoyment, open only to those whom the gods have made, or
+who have made themselves, critical. And in the second, whether
+sophisticated or not, what it gives is the enjoyment of literature not
+of life:[58] whereas the direct satisfaction which genuine letters
+afford is almost identical with that given by actual intercourse with
+other human beings. However, it is unnecessary to "go on refining."
+
+Perhaps indeed, after all, the artificial letters may be permitted if
+only in an "utmost, last, provincial band," to add to the muster of
+pleasure-giving things which epistolary literature so amply provides.
+Even fiction itself, which, as has been said often, draws on this
+source, cannot supply anything more "pastimeous"; even drama anything
+more arresting to the attention. Indeed good letters may be said to be
+constantly presenting little stories, little dramas, little
+pictures--all of them sometimes not so _very_ little--which are now
+practically complete; now easily filled up by any reasonable
+intelligence; now perhaps tantalizingly, but all the more interestingly
+enigmatic. For those people (one may or may not sympathise with them,
+but they are certainly pretty numerous) who cannot take interest or can
+only take a reduced interest in things that "did not really happen";
+letters may be even more interesting than novels. Only to very wayward
+or very unimaginative ones can they be less so, if they are in any
+respect good of their kind.
+
+One of their main attractions is, with the same caution, their
+remarkable _variety_. It has been complained with a certain amount of
+truth that fiction, whether in prose or verse, is a little apt to fall
+into grooves: that all the histories are told, all the plays acted. This
+is undoubtedly the curse of Art, and every now and then we see it
+acknowledged in the most convincing manner by the frantic efforts made
+to be "different." But that real things and persons are never quite
+identical is not merely a philosophical doctrine but a practical fact.
+The "two peas" of one saying are never so much "alike" as the "two
+blades of grass" of another are unlike.
+
+Now as letters--that is to say letters that deserve to exist at all--are
+bound to reproduce the personality of their writers, it will follow that
+a refreshing diversity must also belong to them. And as a matter of fact
+this will be found to be the case. Even the eighteenth century--the
+century of rule and class, of objection to "the streaks of the tulip,"
+of machine-made verse, etc.,--has, except in the case of letters
+artificially made to pattern, shown this signally.
+
+One last recommendation. A bad letter-writer is sure to betray himself
+almost everywhere, and letters are as a rule short. Most people must
+have attempted books of other classes, especially novels, and hoping
+against hope turned them over, and dipped and peeped till repeated
+disappointment compelled the traditional flinging to the other end of
+the room, or simply dropping the thing in less explosive weariness. You
+never need do that with letters. If a man's letters are not worth
+reading you will "have a confessing criminal" at once; if they are he
+will hardly be able to keep the quality latent whenever he goes beyond
+the shortest business note. The man of one book, in the sense of having
+read it, is proverbially formidable but in fact too frequently a bore.
+The man of one letter, in the sense of having written a good one and no
+more, probably never existed.[59]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+GREEK LETTERS.--SYNESIUS (_c._ 375-430)
+
+     English readers may know something, from Kingsley's
+     _Hypatia_, of the excellent bishop of Ptolemais who, at the
+     meeting of the fourth and fifth centuries, combined the
+     functions of neo-Platonist philosopher, Christian prelate,
+     country gentleman, and most efficient yeomanry officer
+     against the ancestors, or at least forerunners, of the
+     present Senussi, who were constantly raiding his diocese and
+     its neighbourhood. These two letters--to Hypatia herself and
+     to his brother--show him in different, but in each case
+     favourable lights.
+
+
+LETTER CVIII. (TO HIS BROTHER)
+
+I have already got 300 spears and as many cutlasses, though I had, even
+before, only half a score two-edged swords: and these long flat blades
+are not forged with us. But I think the cutlasses can be struck more
+vigorously into the enemies' bodies, and so we shall use them. And at
+need we shall have bludgeons--for the wild olive trees are good with
+us.[60] Some of our men have single-bladed axes at their belts with
+which those of us who have no defensive armour shall chop their[61]
+shields and make them fight on equal terms. The fight will, at a guess,
+come off to-morrow: for when some of the foe had fallen in with scouts
+of ours and pursuing them at their best speed had found them too good to
+catch, they bade them tell us what pleased us mightily--if indeed we may
+no more have to wander in the footsteps of those fellows who made off
+into the wastes of the interior. For they said they were going to stay
+where they were and wanted to find out what sort of fellows _we_ were,
+who dared to separate ourselves so many days' journey from our own place
+that we might fight with men of war, nomads in way of life, and whose
+civil polity was like our discipline in war-time. Therefore, as one who
+by God's help shall to-morrow conquer--nay, conquer again if needful
+(for I would say nothing of bad omen) I commit to thee the care of my
+children: for it is fitting that thou, their uncle, shouldest carry over
+thine affection to them.
+
+
+LETTER CXXIV
+
+"But if oblivion be the lot of the dead in Hades yet will _I_, even
+there, remember" my dear Hypatia. Beset as I am by the sufferings of my
+country, and sick, as I see daily weapons of war about me and men
+slaughtered like altar-victims; drawing as I do breath infected by
+rotting corpses; expecting myself a similar fate, (for who can be
+hopeful when the very atmosphere is weighed down and dusky with the
+shadow of carnivorous birds?) yet do I cling to my country. For what
+else would my feeling be, born and bred as I am, and with the not
+ignoble tombs of my fathers before my eyes? For thee alone does it seem
+to me that I could neglect my country, and if I could get leisure, force
+myself to run away.[62]
+
+
+LATIN LETTERS.--PLINY (62-114)
+
+     The most famous letters of the younger Pliny are those which
+     describe his country houses, that which gives account of his
+     uncle's death in the great eruption of Vesuvius, and his
+     correspondence with Trajan. But the first mentioned are
+     rather long and require a good deal of technical
+     annotation;[63] the second is to be found in many books; and
+     the letters which make up the third (except those concerning
+     Christianity, which are again to be found in many places)
+     are mostly short and on points of business merely. The one I
+     have chosen is extremely characteristic, in two respects, of
+     the author and of Roman ways generally. It shows Pliny's
+     good-nature and right feeling, but it shows also a certain
+     "priggishness" with which he has been specially and
+     personally charged, but which, to speak frankly, he shared
+     with a great many of his famous countrymen. Priggishness was
+     almost unknown among the Greeks--though one may suspect its
+     presence among those Spartans who have told so few tales of
+     themselves. But it flourished at Rome, and was one of
+     Rome's many--and one of her worst--legacies to us moderns.
+     Secondly, the letter is amusing because one thinks what an
+     English judge would surely think and would probably say, if
+     counsel for a lady were to inform the court _uberius et
+     latius_ what an extremely good opinion that lady's father
+     had of him, the learned speaker. A minor but still
+     interesting difference is in Pliny's slight hesitation about
+     taking a brief against a consul-elect. The subtleties of
+     Roman etiquette are endless.
+
+
+PLINIUS TO HIS ASINIUS GALLUS--HEALTH
+
+You both advise[64] and ask me to take up the cause of Corellia in her
+absence against C. Caecilius, Consul elect. I am obliged to you for
+advising me but I complain of your _asking_. I ought to be advised that
+I may know the fact, but not asked to do what it would be most
+disgraceful for me _not_ to do. Could I doubt about protecting the
+daughter of Corellius? True, there is between me and him against whom
+you call on me, not exactly close friendship but still some friendship.
+There is also to be taken into account the man's worth and the honour to
+which he is destined, a thing which I ought to hold in the greater
+respect that I have myself already enjoyed it. For it is natural that
+things which one has oneself attained, one should wish to be regarded
+with the greatest respect. But when I think that I am to help Corellius'
+daughter, all this appears idle and empty. I seem to see the man than
+whom our age had no one more dignified, more pious, of an acuter mind;
+the man whom, when I had begun to like him out of admiration I admired
+more, contrary to what usually happens, the more thoroughly I knew him.
+For I did know him thoroughly; he kept nothing hid from me, neither
+jocular nor serious, neither sad nor glad. I was quite a young man: but
+already he held me in honour and I will dare to say respect--as if I
+were his contemporary. He gave me his vote and interest in my standings
+for honours; he, when I entered upon them, was my introducer and
+companion; when I carried them out, my adviser and guide. In fact, in
+every business of mine, though he was an old man and in weak health, he
+was as forward as if he were young and strong. How much he furthered my
+reputation, privately, publicly, and even with the Chief of the State!
+For when by chance, in the presence of the Emperor Nerva, the
+conversation had turned on young men of worth, and several persons spoke
+in praise of me, he kept silence for a little, which gave him the more
+authority. Then in the weighty manner you know, "I must needs," he said,
+"say all the less about Secundus[65] because he never does anything but
+by my advice." By saying this he gave me the credit (which it would have
+been extravagant in me to hope for) of never doing anything in other
+than the wisest way, seeing that I always acted on the advice of the
+wisest man. Moreover, when dying, he said to his daughter, as she is
+wont to declare, "I have provided you, as if I were myself to live
+longer, many friends: but for the chief of them Secundus and Cornutus."
+Now when I remember this, I see I must take care not in any way to
+disappoint the trust in me of this most fore-thoughtful man. Therefore I
+will come to Corellia's help without the least delay and will not refuse
+to undergo inconveniences: though I think I shall secure not merely
+pardon but even praise from the very person who as you say is bringing
+a new action as against a woman, if it should happen to me to say these
+same things in court more amply and fully than the narrow room of a
+letter permits, either to excuse or indeed commend myself. Farewell.
+
+
+LETTER OF THE "DARK" AGES
+
+SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS (431?-482-4)
+
+     Caius Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris is one of the most
+     interesting figures of the troubled and obscure period
+     intervening between the fall of the Roman Empire _proper_
+     and the rise of mediaeval Europe. He was born at Lyons,
+     married Papianilla, daughter of Flavius Avitus, who was to
+     be one of the ephemeral "Emperors" of the West and the
+     Decadence, but was not injured by his father-in-law's
+     dethronement, and enjoyed various civil honours and posts.
+     In 471, though a married layman, he was peremptorily made a
+     bishop, and accordingly took orders, put away his wife, and
+     discharged his sacred duties as creditably as he had
+     discharged his profane ones. Sidonius was a not contemptible
+     poet, and an interesting letter-writer. Like most literary
+     men of his class he was given to what we call flattery; and
+     this Ecdicius, of whom he made a sort of Dark Age Admirable
+     Crichton, was his brother-in-law, an Emperor's son, and
+     Count or Duke (the titles were often interchangeable) of the
+     district. But it is fair to say that Gregory of Tours, the
+     accepted historian of the period, and living only in the
+     next century, makes the exploit over the Goths even more
+     signal--for he reduces the troopers to _ten_. The Arverni
+     (inhabitants of Auvergne and its neighbourhood) were the
+     strongest tribe in Southern Gaul when the Romans first came
+     into contact with them, retained much prominence in Caesar's
+     time, and had not lost individuality, if they had lost
+     independence, by this (5th) century. The mixture of "Arms"
+     and the "Gown" is noteworthy.
+
+
+BOOK III. LETTER III
+
+SIDONIUS TO HIS ECDICIUS--HEALTH
+
+If ever, now you are longed for by my Arvernians, whose love for you
+subdues them remarkably, and indeed for all sorts of reasons. First,
+because a man's native land has the greatest part in creating affection
+for him.[66] Then, because in your time you are about the only mortal
+who was longed for before his birth as much as he was rejoiced in after
+it.... I say nothing of such things--common to all, but no mean
+incitement to affection--as that you crawled as a child on the same turf
+with them. I pass over the grass which you first trod, the river you
+first swam, the woods you broke through in hunting. I leave out the fact
+that it was here you first played ball[67] and backgammon,[68] that you
+hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the bow. I omit the fact that for the
+sake of your boyish presence students of letters came hither from all
+parts; and that it was due to you as an individual that our nobility,
+anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech, imbued itself now with the
+style of oratory, now with the measures of the Muse. And this specially
+kindled the love of the community[69] that you forbade those whom you
+had already made Latins[70] to remain barbarians.[71] For it could never
+slip the memory of our citizens what and how great you seemed, to every
+age and rank and sex on the half-ruined mounds of our walls, when,
+accompanied by scarcely eighteen horsemen, you cut your way through some
+thousands of Goths in full daylight and (which posterity will hardly
+believe) in the open field. A well trained army stood aghast at the
+sound of your name and the sight of your person: so that the leaders of
+the enemy, in their astonishment, hardly knew how many were their
+followers, how few yours. Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a
+steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your
+appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some
+of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of
+the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you
+not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when
+you returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet you in the
+way of official compliments, applause, tears, rejoicings can be better
+guessed than described. One might see in the crammed halls of the
+spacious palace that happy ovation for your thronged return. Some caught
+up the dust of your footsteps to kiss it: others took out the horses'
+curbs stained with blood and foam; others prepared the stands for the
+saddles drenched with the horses' sweat; others, when you were about to
+put off your helmet, unbuckled the clasps of its plated chin-straps, or
+busied themselves with unlacing your greaves. Yet others counted the
+notches on the swords, blunted with slaughter, or measured with
+livid[72] fingers the rings of the corslets, slashed or pierced by
+weapons.[73]
+
+
+EARLY MEDIAEVAL LETTER (TWELFTH CENTURY)
+
+     Of the other persons mentioned in this letter besides the
+     widowed Duchess and King Louis VII., the first is Ralph,
+     Count of (Peronne and) Vermandois, a leper. The lady's name
+     was Eleanor, and she also was probably a widow; the
+     Duchess's son Hugh was third of that name as Duke of
+     Burgundy. Ivo, Count of Soissons, was the guardian of the
+     Count of Vermandois, incapacitated legally by his plague.
+     The proposed marriage did not come off. The business-like
+     tone of the letter will only surprise those who do not
+     really know the "Ages of Romance." I owe the selection of it
+     to my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., who came to my aid
+     in the dearth of books of this period which circumstances
+     imposed on me.
+
+To Louis[74] most excellent King of the Franks by the grace of God, and
+her most beloved Lord, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy--health and due
+respect. It is known to your Majesty that my son is your liegeman, and,
+if it please you, your kinsman also. Whatsoever he can do is yours: and
+if he could do more it were yours. And so I all the more confidently ask
+your highest affection for my son. For it has been told me that Count
+Ralph of Peronne has a certain marriageable sister who, as has been
+reported to me and her own people, would be a suitable wife for my son.
+For this reason, most beloved Lord, I and he ask that you would look to
+this matter yourself and speak about it to the Count of Soissons, and
+settle how this marriage may be contracted. You must know that though my
+son might marry in another kingdom, I greatly prefer that he should
+take a wife in yours, rather than in any other. The nearer he becomes
+connected with you the more will he be yours and altogether a profit to
+you.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] It may of course be "illustrated" in the other sense by a second use
+of the pen; and we shall have instances of this kind to notice.
+
+[2] As has often been pointed out Ben Jonson's exquisite "Drink to me
+only with thine eyes" is a verse-paraphrase or mosaic from this writer's
+prose.
+
+[3] Pliny, if he did not always "write for publication," deliberately
+"published," as we should say, his letters. Indeed, he is one of the
+first to use the word in this sense, even if he uses it immediately of
+an oration not a letter. Some think Cicero meant publication; and he was
+very likely to do so.
+
+[4] The Latin statesman, like the Greek bishop, condescends to write
+about wine and even more fully. One of the most interesting and
+informing things on the subject is his discourse on _vinum acinaticium_,
+a sort of Roman Imperial Tokay made from grapes kept till the frost had
+touched them.
+
+[5] Genuine letters of Sappho would have been of the first interest to
+compare with those of Heloise, and the "Portuguese Nun" and Mademoiselle
+de Lespinasse. Diotima's might have been as disappointing as George
+Eliot's: but by no means must necessarily have been so. Aspasia's,
+sometimes counterfeited, ought to have been good.
+
+[6] It is part of the plan to give, as a sort of Appendix to the
+Introduction, and extension of it towards the main body of text, some
+specimens of Greek, Roman (classical and post-classical) and Early
+Mediaeval letter-writing, translated for the purpose by the present
+writer. The _continuity_ of literary history is a thing which deserves
+to be attended to, especially when there is an ever-growing tendency to
+confine attention to things modern--albeit so soon to be antiquated! I
+owe the last of these specimens, in the Latin from which I translate it,
+to the kindness of my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., to whom I had
+recourse as not myself having access to a large library at the moment,
+and who has assisted me in other parts of this book.
+
+[7] Yet others, as to authenticity, have, I believe, been rejected by
+all competent scholarship.
+
+[8] Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charrière.
+
+[9] Some of us think Blake a great poet; but this is scarcely a general
+opinion, and he does not appear till the century was three parts over.
+Burns (whose own letters by the way do him little justice) hardly comes
+in.
+
+[10] Especially the most popular and voluminous if not the most
+important of all--the periodical and the novel.
+
+[11] The danger being of many sorts--usually in the direction of various
+kinds of _excess_. A _quietly_ tragic letter may be a masterpiece:
+perhaps there is no finer example than one to be again referred to, of
+Mrs. Carlyle's.
+
+[12] Mr. Paul thinks that "the baby language" is terribly out of
+character, and that there is "too much of it"; that Swift "would try to
+make love though he did not know what love meant"; and that the whole
+rings hollow and insincere. Others, women as well as men, have held that
+the "little language" is only less pathetic than it is charming; that
+Swift was one of the greatest, if one of the unhappiest lovers of the
+world; and that the thing is as sincere as if it had been written in the
+Palace of Truth and only hollow as is the space between Heaven and Hell.
+
+[13] It should never be, but perhaps sometimes is, forgotten that
+"Stella" was a lady of unusual wits, and of what Swift's greatest
+decrier called in his own protegée Mrs. Williams "universal curiosity,"
+that is to say not "inquisitiveness" but "intelligent interest." The
+politics etc. are not mere selfish attention to what interests the
+writer only.
+
+[14] It must not be forgotten that she was Fielding's cousin. And after
+the remark above on Swift it is pleasant and may be fair to say that Mr.
+Paul is a hearty "Marian."
+
+[15] Johnson is again the chief and by no means trustworthy witness for
+this "insolence." But in the same breath he admitted that Chesterfield
+was "dignified." Now dignity is almost as doubtfully compatible with
+insolence as with impudence.
+
+[16] It is difficult to think of anyone who has combined statesmanship
+(Chesterfield's accomplishments in which are constantly forgotten),
+social gifts and literary skill in an equal degree.
+
+[17] Excluding of course purely historical and public things like the
+trials of the '45 and the riots of '80.
+
+[18] They were travelling together (always rather a test of friendship)
+in Italy, and Horace, as he confesses, no doubt gave himself airs. But
+it is pretty certain that Gray had not at this time, if he ever had,
+that fortunate combination of good (or at least well-commanded) temper
+and good breeding which enables a gentleman to meet such conduct with
+conduct on his own side as free from petulant "touchiness" as from
+ignoble parasitism.
+
+[19] Gray was not, like Walpole, a richly endowed sinecurist. But to use
+a familiar "bull" he seems never to have had anything to do, and never
+to have done it when he had. His poems are a mere handful; his excellent
+_Metrum_ is a fragment; and as Professor of History at Cambridge he
+never did anything at all.
+
+[20] They do not seem to have known each other personally. But (for
+reasons not difficult to assign but here irrelevant) Johnson was on the
+whole, though not wholly, unjust to Gray, and Gray seems to have
+disliked and spoken rudely of Johnson.
+
+[21] The varieties of what may be called literary _exercise_ which have
+been utilised for educational or recreative purposes, are almost
+innumerable. Has anyone ever tried "breaking up" a letter (such as those
+to be given hereafter) into a conversation by interlarded comment,
+questions, etc.?
+
+[22] As far as the accidents are concerned. The essentials vary not.
+Marianne is eternal, whether she faints and blushes, or jazzes and--does
+not blush.
+
+[23] One unfortunate exception, the _ex-post facto_ references to the
+split with Lady Austin, may be urged by a relentless prosecutor. But
+when William has to choose between Mary and Anna it will go hard but he
+will _have_ to be unfair to one of them.
+
+[24] This "swan's" utterances in poetry were quite unlike those of
+Tennyson's dying bird: and her taste in it was appalling. She tells
+Scott that the Border Ballads were totally destitute of any right to the
+name.
+
+[25] For a singular misjudgment on this point see Prefatory Note
+_infra_.
+
+[26] Particularly when he is able to apply the _Don Juan_ mood of
+sarcastic if rather superficial life-criticism in which he was a real
+master.
+
+[27] _I.e._ "violently and vulgarly absurd."
+
+[28] It may, however, be suggested that the extraordinary _bluntness_
+(to use no stronger word) of both is almost sufficiently evidenced in
+the fact that in his last edition of Keats Mr. Forman committed the
+additional outrage of distributing these letters according to their
+dates among the rest. The isolation of the agony gives almost the only
+possible excuse for revealing it.
+
+[29] It is of course true that Shelley himself did not at first quite
+appreciate Keats. But _Adonais_ cancels the deficit and leaves an almost
+infinite balance in favour. One can only hope that, had the
+circumstances been reversed, Keats would have set the account right as
+triumphantly.
+
+[30] This tendency makes it perhaps desirable to observe that in the
+_particular_ context of the _Belle Dame_ there is nothing whatever to
+cavil at.
+
+[31] The recent centenary saw, as usual, with much welcome appreciation
+some uncritical excesses.
+
+[32] In not a few cases they may be said to have been deliberately
+_un_prepared--intended though not labelled as "private and
+confidential."
+
+[33] In which, be it remembered, the "Life-and-Letters" system only came
+in quite late.
+
+[34] At the very moment when this is being written a considerable new
+body of them is announced for sale.
+
+[35] The word "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is intended to
+indicate something of the general difference between "classical" ages on
+the one side and "romantic" or "realist" on the other.
+
+[36] Chesterfield's deafness might, without frivolity, be brought in. It
+is a hindrance to conversation, but none to letter-writing.
+
+[37] Or at least expression of themselves.
+
+[38] Idly: because he himself expressly and repeatedly disclaims _mere_
+"translation."
+
+[39] Dryden, in reference to Shadwell.
+
+[40] "The Great God Pan" piece ("A Musical Instrument"), one of the
+last, was perhaps her _very_ best. But he may have been thinking of
+_Poems before Congress_, which are poor enough.
+
+[41] Lucy, daughter of that curious Quaker banker's clerk Bernard
+Barton, whose poetry is negligible, but who must have had some strong
+personal attraction. For he was a favourite correspondent of two of the
+greatest of contemporary letter-writers, Lamb and FitzGerald, though he
+constantly misunderstood their letters; he received from Byron--on an
+occasion likely to provoke one of the "noble poet's" outbursts of
+pseudo-aristocratic insolence--a singularly wise and kindly answer; and
+having as a perfect stranger lectured Sir Robert Peel he was--invited to
+dinner!
+
+[42] Some have attempted to make a distinction, alleging that there are
+Franceses who can be called "Fanny" and others who can not. But it is
+doubtful whether this holds. Of two great proficients of "letter-stuff"
+in overlapping generations Fanny Burney was eminently a "Fanny." Fanny
+Kemble, though always called so, was not.
+
+[43] She was the niece of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, generally
+considered the greatest tragic actor and actress we have had; the
+daughter of Charles Kemble, a player and manager of long practice and
+great ability; while she had yet another uncle and any number of more
+distant relations in the profession.
+
+[44] See Prefatory Note on her letters _infra_, for an illustration of
+what is said of her here and of Mrs. Carlyle a little further.
+
+[45] Gray may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on everyone:
+but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted that the more you
+read Walpole the more does the prejudice, which Macaulay and others have
+helped to create against him, crumble and melt.
+
+[46] They grow more and more numerous; a fresh batch having been
+announced while this Introduction was being written.
+
+[47] I see that Mr. Paul also has made special reference to this letter
+and no wonder. From the time of its first publication I have regarded it
+as matchless. But it seems to me that while it is lawful to mention it,
+it should not have been published and that to republish it here would be
+at least questionable.
+
+[48] The present writer remembers as a boy reading (he supposes in the
+newspaper to which it was addressed but is not sure) this very
+remarkable epistle of Reade's to an editor: "Sir, you have brains of
+your own and good ones. Do not echo the bray of such a very small ass as
+the...." There was more, but this was the gist of it. Whether it has
+ever reappeared he cannot say.
+
+[49] Anthony Trollope did not choose to make his Autobiography a
+"Life-and-Letters." But he has used the inserted letter very freely and
+sometimes with great effect in his novels, for instance Mr. Slope's to
+Eleanor Harding in _Barchester Towers_.
+
+[50] In his Essay mentioned in Preface.
+
+[51] The "Answer to the Introductory Epistle" of _The Monastery_.
+
+[52] This plan was older than the "novel _by_ letters," and had, as
+noticed above, been largely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+century "heroic" romance.
+
+[53] There is of course a class exactly opposite to the
+love-letter--that of more or less modified hate or at least dislike.
+Johnson's epistle to Chesterfield is an example of the dignified form of
+this; Hazlitt's to Gifford of the undignified. But considering our
+deserved reputation for humour we are less strong than might be expected
+in letters which make the supposed writer make _himself_ ridiculous.
+Sydney Smith's "Noodle's Oration" is the sort of thing in another kind:
+and some of the letters in the _Spectator_ class of periodical are fun
+in the kind itself. Defoe's _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ comes
+near. But we have nothing like the famous _Epistolae Obscurorum
+Virorum_, which are the very triumph of the style.
+
+[54] See the extensive classification of the Greeks, as noticed and
+reproduced before.
+
+[55] The "Letter to Sir W. Windham" of the one and the "Letter to a
+noble Lord" of the other, have ample justification. _Letters on a
+Regicide Peace_, great as they are in themselves, have less claim to
+their title. But it was a favourite with both writers.
+
+[56] The King was William and the Queen Mary, which limits considerably
+the otherwise rather illimitable "concerning the kingdom."
+
+[57] This word is of course a _vox nihili_, being neither French nor
+English. But it has usage in its favour, and I do not see that it is
+improved by writing it "_dis_habille." If anyone prefers the actual
+French form he can add the accents.
+
+[58] The account of the journey with Lintot the publisher is sometimes
+quoted in disproof of this. It is amusing, but has still to some tastes
+Pope's factitiousness without the technical charm of his verse to carry
+it off.
+
+[59] There is one small but rather famous class of letters which perhaps
+should receive separate though brief notice. It is that of laconic and
+either intentionally or unintentionally humorous utilisations of the
+letter-form. Of one sort Captain Walton's "Spanish fleet taken and
+destroyed as per margin" is probably the most noted type: of another the
+equally famous rejoinder of the Highland magnate to his rival "Dear
+Glengarry, When you have proved yourself to be my chief, I shall be
+happy to admit your claim. Meanwhile I am Yours, Macdonald." In pure
+farce of an irreverent kind, the possibly apocryphal interchange between
+a Royal Duke and a Right Reverend Bishop, "Dear Cork, Please ordain
+Stanhope, Yours, York," and "Dear York, Stanhope's ordained. Yours,
+Cork," has the palm as a recognised "chestnut." But these things are
+only the frills if not even the froth of the subject; and those who
+imitate them should exercise caution in the imitation. The
+police-courts, and even more exalted, but still more unwholesome abodes
+of Justice, have sometimes been the consequences of misguided satire in
+letters. Even in Captain Walton's case the Spaniards are said to have
+endeavoured to show that his ironical laconism (which, moreover,
+tradition has perhaps exaggerated in form) was not strictly in
+accordance with fact.
+
+[60] Wild olive, with more peaceful uses, was also the usual material
+for the _un_peaceful club, or quarter-staff, often iron-shod, of the
+ancients. It was probably like the _lathi_ which the mild Hindoo takes
+with him to political meetings. The [Greek: pelekys] of the ancients was
+generally double-bladed, hence the limitation here. This would be
+lighter and more convenient to carry in the belt.
+
+[61] Of course "the enemies'."
+
+[62] Synesius addresses his letters to Hypatia [Greek: tê
+philosophô]--"To _the_ Philosophess." This contains at least two of the
+unapproachable "portmanteau" words in which Greek, and especially late
+Greek abounds--[Greek: philochôrôn], "loving one's country," and [Greek:
+metanasteuein], a rare and complicated compound in which I have ventured
+to see a hint of ironic intention. He feels that he will be a sort of
+shirker or deserter ([Greek: meta] often imparts this meaning) but he
+will be coming to _her_.
+
+[63] This necessity of annotating beyond suitable limits was what
+prevented me, after due re-reading for the purpose, from giving any
+letter of Cicero's.
+
+[64] _Admoneo_ in Latin not unfrequently has our commercial sense of
+"advise" = inform, or remind of a fact. It will be remembered that in
+Elizabethan English this sense was not limited to business, as in "Art
+thou aviséd of that."
+
+[65] The younger Pliny's full name was C. Plinius _Secundus_.
+
+[66] Among other natives of course.
+
+[67] Doubtless the game still played in Italy (_pallone_) and the South
+of France, with a wooden hand-guard strapped to the arm.
+
+[68] _Pyrgus_ is not exactly backgammon. The Romans had a sort of
+combined dice-box and board--the latter having a kind of tower fixed on
+the side with interior steps or stops, among which the dice tumbled and
+twisted before they fell out.
+
+[69] _Universitas_: but though the context seems tempting, it is too
+early for "university" as a translation.
+
+[70] _I.e._ in citizenship.
+
+[71] _I.e._ in speech.
+
+[72] Why _livescentibus_ I am not sure. "Bruised by the rough mail"? But
+Lucretius has _digiti livescunt_: and Sidonius, like other poets of
+other decadences, is apt to borrow the phrases of his great
+predecessors.
+
+[73] Sidonius has nearly as much more of this curious story: but the
+picture of the excitable Celts mobbing their heroes is vivid enough to
+make a good stopping-place. If things really went as described, one must
+suppose that a sudden panic came on the Goths, and that they took
+Ecdicius and his handful of troopers as merely _éclaireurs_ of a sally
+in force, and drew back to the higher ground to resist it.
+
+[74] His own experience of marriage cannot have made the subject wholly
+agreeable to him: for he was, it may not be quite impertinent to remind
+the reader, the first husband of Eleanor of Guienne.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH LETTERS
+
+
+
+
+THE PASTONS. FIFTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+     Few families in England have achieved a permanent "place i'
+     the story" after such a curious fashion as the Pastons of
+     Paston (Pastons "of that ilk") in Norfolk. They were not
+     exactly "great people" and no member of the family was of
+     very eminent distinction in any walk of life, though they
+     had judges, soldiers, and sailors etc. among them, and
+     though, some time before the house became extinct, its
+     representative attained the peerage with the title of Earl
+     of Yarmouth. But they were busy people in the troublesome
+     times of the Roses, and they obtained a good deal of
+     property, partly by the death of Sir John Fastolf, noted in
+     the French wars and muddled by posterity (there seems to
+     have been no real resemblance between them except an
+     accusation of cowardice, probably false in both cases, and
+     an imperfectly anagrammatised relation of names) with
+     Shakespeare's "Falstaff." But they produced, received, and
+     kept a great mass of letters which, despite the extinction
+     of the family in 1732 survived, were partially printed later
+     in the century by Fenn, and more fully a hundred years after
+     by the late Mr. Gairdner. Although (see Introduction) of no
+     particular literary merit they are singularly varied in
+     subject and authorship, and they give us perhaps a more
+     complete view of the domestic experiences of a single family
+     (not dissociated from public affairs) than we have from any
+     period of English history till quite modern times. Indeed,
+     it would not be easy to put the finger on an exact parallel
+     to them at _any_ time. I have selected from a great mass of
+     documents two--one of love and one of war according to the
+     good old division. John Jernyngan's letter to Margaret
+     Mauteby--wife of John Paston, and one of the most notable
+     and businesslike, though not the least affectionate of wives
+     and mothers--is interesting for its combination of the two
+     motives (were there also _two_ "Mistress Blanches"?) and for
+     the delightfully English frankness of its confession that
+     "we were well and truly beat." On the other hand, that of
+     Miss Margery Brews to John Paston the youngest (the John
+     named above had two sons of his own name) is one of the most
+     agreeable pieces of "plain and holy innocence," as Miranda
+     calls it, on record. It is immediately preceded in the
+     collection by another in which she is equally loving, and
+     quotes some of the shockingly bad fifteenth century verse.
+     One regrets to say that her "Valentine" had, apparently,
+     more than one string to his bow at the moment. However,
+     after vicissitudes in the "matter," as she delicately calls
+     it, John and Margery did marry, and from them proceeded the
+     later stages of the family. Whether things went equally well
+     with Mr. Jernyngan and his Blanche (or either of his
+     Blanches) does not seem to be recorded. (It has been thought
+     better, though the taste of the moment seems to go rather
+     the other way, not to encumber the reader with the original
+     spelling, but there is no further modernisation.)
+
+
+1. LETTER 317 (GAIRDNER)
+
+Date June 1, 1458
+
+Right worshipful and my most best beloved mistress and cousin, I
+recommend me to you as lowly as I may, ever more desiring to hear of
+your good welfare; the which I beseech almighty Jesus to preserve you
+and keep you to his pleasure and to your gracious heart's desire. And,
+if it please you to hear of my welfare, I was in good heal(th) at the
+making of this letter, blessed be God.
+
+Praying you that it please you for to send me word if my father was at
+Norwich with you at this Trinitymas or no, and how the matter doth
+between my mistress Blanche Witchingham and me and if ye suppose that it
+shall be brought about or no, and how ye feel my father, if he be well
+willing thereto or no; praying you lowly that I may be recommend(ed)
+lowly to my mistress Arblaster's wife, and to my mistress Blanche her
+daughter specially.
+
+Right worshipful cousin, if it please you for to hear of such tidings as
+we have here, the embassy of Burgundy shall come to Calais the Saturday
+after Corpus Christi day, as men say, 500 horse of them. Moreover on
+Trinity Sunday in the morning came tidings unto my Lord of Warwick that
+there were 28 sails of Spaniards on the sea, and whereof there was 16
+great ships of forecastle. And then my Lord[75] went and manned 5 ships
+of forecastle and three carvells, and four pinnaces, and on the Monday,
+in the morning after Trinity Sunday, we met together afore Calais at 4
+at the clock in the morning and fought that (_sic_) gether till 10 at
+the clock. And there we took six of their ships and they slew of our men
+about four twenties and hurt a two hundred of us right sore; and there
+were slain on their part about twelve twenties and hurt a five hundred
+of them.
+
+And (it) happened me at the first aboarding of us, we took a ship of
+three hundred ton, and I was left therein and 23 men with me; and they
+fought so sore that our men were fain to leave them, and then come they
+and aboarded[76] the ship that I was in and there I was taken, and was
+prisoner with them 6 hours, and was delivered again for their men that
+were taken before. And as men say, there was not so great a battle upon
+the sea this forty winters. And forsooth we were well and truly beat:
+and my Lord hath sent for more ships, and like to fight together again
+in haste.
+
+No more I write unto you at this time, but that it please you for to
+recommend me unto my right reverend and worshipful cousin your husband,
+and mine uncle Gurney, and to mine aunt his wife and to all good masters
+and friends where it shall please you; and after the writing I have from
+you, I shall be at you in all haste. Written on Corpus Christi day in
+great haste by your own humble servant and cousin,
+
+JOHN JERNYNGAN.
+
+
+2. LETTER 784 (GAIRDNER)
+
+Date Feb. 1477
+
+Right worshipful and well-beloved Valentine, in my most humble wise I
+recommend me unto you. And heartily I thank you for the letter which
+that ye send me by John Beckerton, whereby I am informed and know that
+ye be purposed to come to Topcroft in short time, and without any errand
+or matter but only to have a conclusion of the matter between my father
+and you. I would be most glad of any creature in life so that the
+matter might grow to effect. And there as ye say, an ye come and find
+the matter no more towards you than ye did aforetime, ye would no more
+put my father and my lady my mother to no cost nor business, for that
+cause, a good while after--which causeth mine heart to be full heavy:
+and if that ye come, and the matter take to none effect, then should I
+be much more sorry and full of heaviness.
+
+And as for myself I have done and understood in the matter that I can
+and may, as good[77] knoweth: and I let you plainly understand that my
+father will no more money part withal in that behalf but £100 and one
+mark which is right far from the accomplishment of your desire.
+
+Wherefore if that ye could be content with that good, and my poor
+person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground. And if ye think not
+yourself so satisfied, or that ye might have much more good, as I have
+understood by you afore--good, true, and loving Valentine,[78] that ye
+take no such labour upon you as to come more for that matter but let it
+pass and never more be spoken of, as I may be your true lover and
+bedeswoman[79] during my life.
+
+No more unto you at this time but Almighty Jesus preserve you both body
+and soul.
+
+By your Valentine,
+
+M. B.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[75] It is to be feared that "My Lord's" action was rather piratical.
+The "Spanish Fleet" was of merchantmen ("convoyed" perhaps) on their way
+to the North with iron etc. for fish, silk, etc., and we were not
+definitely at war with Spain. But Henry the IV. of Castile was an ally
+of France. Warwick had just been appointed "Captain of Calais," and it
+was a general English idea that anything not English in the Channel was
+fair prize. Warwick's conduct was warmly welcomed in London.
+
+[76] This use of "abord" and that just before are slightly different
+derivatives of the French _aborder_, which means to "approach,"
+"accost," "come together with" as well as to "board" in the naval sense.
+The first use here is evidently of the more general, the second of the
+particular kind.
+
+[77] This may be a mere mis-spelling of "God," or a sort of euphemism
+like the modern "thank _goodness_!" to avoid the more sacred name.
+
+[78] "I would" or "take care" or something similar to be supplied to
+make a somewhat softened imperative.
+
+[79] One who prays for you.
+
+
+
+
+ROGER ASCHAM (1515-1568)
+
+
+     Although the old phrase about "the schoolmaster being
+     abroad" has never before had anything like the amount of
+     applicableness which it now possesses, there is perhaps
+     still a certain prejudice against schoolmasters. Indeed even
+     some who have more than served time in that capacity will
+     admit that it is a dangerous employment, profession, or
+     vocation. But if all of us had been ever, or ever would try
+     to be, like Roger Ascham, our class would never have
+     deserved, or would victoriously wiped off, any obloquy. It
+     was extraordinary good quality, or more extraordinary good
+     fortune, that made the same man write _Toxophilus_ and _The
+     Schoolmaster_. And there need hardly be any admission of
+     possible good luck as causing, though some certainly helped,
+     his performance as a letter-writer. Something was said
+     before as to the importance of his "getting to English" in
+     this matter. But it may be permissible to remind, or perhaps
+     even inform, some readers of the curious combination which
+     made this importance. As a Renaissance scholar; as a College
+     tutor before the middle of the sixteenth century; as a
+     Secretary of Embassy on the Continent; and as Latin
+     Secretary at Court, he was positively _un_likely to favour
+     the vernacular. Nor could anyone be a warmer or wiser lover
+     of the classics than he was. But what he, being all these
+     things, did for English was all the more influential, while
+     the manner of his doing it could hardly be bettered.
+
+     Ascham's letters being partly in English and partly in
+     Latin, there is a certain temptation to translate one of the
+     latter and put it side by side with one of the former. But
+     the process might not be fair: and to give the fairer chance
+     of comparison between originals in the two tongues would be
+     out of the scheme of this book. I therefore choose a part of
+     one of his long letters of travel to Cambridge friends--one
+     of the earliest of the many "Up the Rhines" in English
+     literature--and another part of his letters to Cecil. He has
+     been reproached with the "begging" character of these, but
+     it was the way of the time with Renaissance scholars. In the
+     first "ioney" (Giles's text) must be wrong and towards the
+     end "vile" is an amusing blunder for "_o_ile." "Peter
+     Ailand" a Cambridge friend's child. "Brant" = "steep." In
+     the second "Denny" is Sir Anthony D., a great favourite of
+     Henry VIII. and Edward VI. who was now dead. "Cheke" the
+     still better known "Sir John" had "taught Cambridge and King
+     Edward Greek," and so raised the "goodly crop" but had taken
+     to politics, which were to bring him into trouble.[80]
+
+
+3. TO MR. EDWARD RAVEN [EXTRACT]
+
+AUGSBURG Jan. 20 1551
+
+13 Octob. We took a fair barge, with goodly glass windows, with seats of
+fir, as close as any house, we knew not whether it went or stood. Rhene
+is such a river that now I do not marvail that the poets make rivers
+gods. Rhene at Spires having a farther course to rin into the ocean sea
+than is the space betwixt Dover and Barwick is broader over a great deal
+than is Thames at Greenwich when it is calm weather. The Rhene runs fast
+and yet as smooth as the sea water stands in a vessel.
+
+From Colen this day we went to Bonna, the bishop's town, the country
+about Rhene here is plain and ioney. We were drawn up Rhene by horses.
+Little villages stand by Rhene side, and as the barge came by, six or
+seven children, some stonenaked, some in their shirts, of the bigness of
+Peter Ailand, would run by use on the sands, singing psalms, and would
+rin and sing with us half a mile, whilst they had some money.
+
+We came late to Bonna at eight of the clock: our men were come afore
+with our horse: we could not be let into the town, no more than they do
+at Calise, after an hour. We stood cold at the gate a whole hour. At
+last we were fain, lord and lady, to lie in our barge all night, where I
+sat in my lady's side-saddle, leaning my head to a malle, better lodged
+than a dozen of my fellows.
+
+14 Octob. We sailed to Brousik: 15 miles afore we come to Bonna begin
+the vines and hills keeping in Rhene on both sides for the space of five
+or six days journey as we made them almost to Mayence, like the hills
+that compass Halifax about, but far branter up, as though the rocks did
+cover you like a pentice (pent-house): on the Rhene side all this
+journey be pathways where horse and man go commonly a yard broad, so
+fair that no weather can make it foul: if you look upwards ye are afraid
+the rocks will fall on your head; if you look downwards ye are afraid to
+tumble into Rhene, and if your horse founder it is not seven to six that
+ye shall miss falling into Rhene, there be many times stairs down into
+Rhene that men may come from their boats and walk on his bank, as we did
+every day four or five miles at once, plucking grapes not with our hands
+but with our mouths if we list.
+
+The grapes grow on the brant rocks so wonderfully that ye will marvel
+how men dare climb up to them, and yet so plentifully, that it is not
+only a marvel where men be found to labour it, but also almost where men
+dwell that drink it. Seven or eight days journey ye cannot cast your
+sight over the compass of vines. And surely this wine of Rhene is so
+good, so natural, so temperate, so ever like itself, as can be wished
+for man's use. I was afraid when I came out of England to miss beer; but
+I am more afraid when I shall come into England, that I cannot lack this
+wine.
+
+It is wonder to see how many castles stand on the tops of these rocks
+unwinable. The three bishops electors, Colen, Trevers and Mayence; be
+the princes almost of whole Rhene. The lansgrave hath goodly castles
+upon Rhene which the emperor cannot get. The palatine of Rhene is also a
+great lord on this river, and hath his name of a castle standing in the
+midst of Rhene on a rock. There be also goodly isles in Rhene, so full
+of walnut trees that they cannot be spent with eating, but they make
+vile of them. In some of these isles stand fair abbeys and nunneries
+wonderfully pleasant. The stones that hang so high over Rhene be very
+much of that stone that you use to write on in tables; every poor man's
+house there is covered with them.
+
+
+4. TO CECIL [EXTRACT]
+
+BRUSSELS March 24. 1553
+
+If I should write oft, ye might think me too bold: and if I did leave
+off, ye might judge me either to forget your gentleness, or to mistrust
+your good will, who hath already so bound me unto you, as I shall rather
+forget myself, and wish God also to forget me, than not labour with all
+diligence and service to apply myself wholly to your will and purpose;
+and that ye shall well know how much I assure myself on your goodness, I
+will pass a piece of good manners, and be bold to borrow a little of
+your small leisure from your weighty affairs in the commonwealth.
+Therefore, if my letters shall find you at any leisure, they will
+trouble you a little in telling you ate length, as I promised in my last
+letters delivered unto you by Mr. Francis Yaxeley, why I am more
+desirous to have your help for my stay at Cambridge still than for any
+other kind of living elsewhere. I having now some experience of life led
+at home and abroad, and knowing what I can do most fitly, and how I
+would live most gladly, do well perceive there is no such quietness in
+England, nor pleasure in strange countries, as even in St. John's
+college, to keep company with the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,
+and Tully. Which my choice of quietness is not purposed to lie in
+idleness, nor constrained by a wilful nature, because I will not or can
+not serve elsewhere, when I trust I could apply myself to mo kinds of
+life than I hope any need shall ever drive me to seek, but only because
+in choosing aptly for myself I might bring some profit to many others.
+And in this mine opinion I stand the more gladly, because it is grounded
+upon the judgment of worthy Mr. Denny. For the summer twelvemonth before
+he departed, dinner and supper he had me commonly with him, whose
+excellent wisdom, mingled with so pleasant mirth, I can never forget:
+emonges many other talks he would say oft unto me, if two duties did not
+command him to serve, the one his prince, the other his wife, he would
+surely become a student in St. John's, saying, "The Court, Mr. Ascham,
+is a place so slippery, that duty never so well done, is not a staff
+stiff enough to stand by always very surely, where ye shall many times
+reap most unkindness where ye have sown greatest pleasures, and those
+also ready to do you most hurt to whom you never intended to think any
+harm." Which sentences I heard very gladly then, and felt them soon
+after myself to be true. Thus I, first ready by mine own nature, then
+moved by good counsel, after driven by ill fortune, lastly called by
+quietness, thought it good to couch myself in Cambridge again. And in
+very deed, too many be pluckt from thence before they be ripe, though I
+myself am withered before I be gathered, and yet not so for that I have
+stood too long, but rather because the fruit which I bear is so very
+small. Yet seeing the goodly crop of Mr. Cheke is almost clean carried
+from thence, and I in a manner alone of that time left a standing
+straggler, peradventure though my fruit be very small, yet because the
+ground from whence it sprung was so good, I may yet be thought somewhat
+fit for seed, when all you the rest are taken up for better store,
+wherewith the king and his realm is now so nobly served. And in such a
+scarcity both of those, that were worthily called away when they were
+fit, and of such as unwisely part from thence, before they be ready, I
+dare now bolden myself, when the best be gone, to do some good among the
+mean that do tarry, trusting that my diligence shall deal with my
+disability, and the rather because the desire of shooting is so well
+shot away in me, either ended by time or left off for better purpose.
+Yet I do amiss to mislike shooting too much, which hath been hitherto my
+best friend, and even now looking back to the pleasure which I found in
+it, and perceiving small repentence to follow after it, by Plato's
+judgment I may think well of it. No, it never called me to go from my
+book, but it made both wit the lustier, and will the readier, to run to
+it again, and perchance going back sometimes from learning may serve
+even as well as it doth at leaping, to pass some of those which keep
+always their standing at their book.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[80] The allusions to the writer's own _Toxophilus_ at the end require,
+it is to be hoped, no annotation.
+
+
+
+
+LADY MARY SIDNEY (?[81]-1586)
+
+
+     This "old Molly," as she so agreeably calls herself, was
+     very unfortunate in her father (that intrusive holder for a
+     short time of the title of Northumberland, who was offensive
+     in success and abject in adversity) and not too lucky in her
+     brother, Leicester. But she must have been far too good for
+     her own breed; she had an excellent husband, Sir Henry
+     Sidney, Deputy of Ireland and President of Wales, one of
+     Elizabeth's best deserving and worst treated servants, and
+     she was the mother of "Astrophel" and Astrophel's sister.
+     "One has known persons more unfortunate," as a famous phrase
+     of a French poem not very long after her own time has it.
+     And she must have thoroughly deserved good fortune: for her
+     letters show her as one of the best of wives and mothers (if
+     not of spellers): though it is quite possible that she might
+     not have made a good jurywoman or a good member of
+     parliament. As her husband was not merely governor
+     (repeatedly and with such success as was possible) of
+     Ireland, but "President of Wales," they usually, when in
+     England but not at Court or at Penshurst, lived at Ludlow
+     Castle and so enjoyed two of the most beautiful homes in the
+     country. But Sir Henry in these and other functions had seas
+     of trouble, great expenses, and according to "Gloriana's"
+     wont, very small thanks for it all. He is said, indeed, to
+     have had his life shortened by weariness and worry. But his
+     son and daughter[82] may have been a comfort to him: and his
+     wife must have been so. The letter itself, as will be seen,
+     is not to himself but to his secretary: and there was more
+     correspondence on the subject of their lodging and its
+     difficulties. Lady Mary was not well, and there must be a
+     place to see friends, and the Queen might come in! The
+     original letter[83] is better spelt than others of hers, the
+     principal curiosity being the form "hit" for "it," which,
+     however, is by no means peculiar.
+
+
+5. TO EDWARD MOLINEUX, ESQ.
+
+You have used the matter very well; but we must do more yet for the good
+dear Lord [her husband] than let him be thus dealt withal. Hampton Court
+I never yet knew so full as there were not spare rooms in it, when it
+has been thrice better filled than at the present it is. But some would
+be sorry, perhaps, my Lord should have so sure a footing in the Court.
+Well, all may be as well when the good God will. The whilst, I pray let
+us do what we may for our Lord's ease and quiet. Whereunto I think if
+you go to my Lord Howard, and in my Lord's name also move his Lordship
+to shew his brother my Lord, (as they call each other)--to show him a
+cast of his office[84] and that it should not be known allege your
+former causes, I think he will find out some place to serve that
+purpose. And also if you go to Mr Bowyer,[85] the gentleman-Usher, and
+tell him his mother requireth him (which is myself) to help my Lord
+with some one room, but only for the dispatch of the multitude of Welsh
+and Irish people that follow him; and that you will give your word in my
+Lord's behalf and mine, it shall not be accounted as a lodging[86] or
+known of, I believe he will make what shift he can: you must assure him
+it is but for the day-time for his business, as indeed it is.
+
+As for my brother's answer of[87] my stay here for five or six days, he
+knows I have ventured far already with so long absence, and am ill
+thought of for it,[88] so as that may not be. But when the worst is
+known, old Lord Harry and his old Moll will do as well as they can in
+parting[89] like good friends the small portion allotted our long
+service in Court, which as little as it is, seems something too
+much.[90] And this being all I can say to the matter, farewell, Mr. Ned.
+
+In haste this Monday 1578,
+
+your assured loving mistress and friend,
+
+M. SYDNEY.
+
+If all this will not serve, prove[91] Mr Huggins, for I know my Lord
+would not for no good be destitute in this time for some convenient
+place for his followers and friends to resort to him, which in the case
+I am in, is not possible to be in _my_ chamber till after sunset, when
+the dear good Lord shall be, as best becomes him, Lord of his own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[81] Her birth-date does not seem to be known, but she was married in
+1551.
+
+[82] He had another, of the (for an English girl) very unusual name of
+"Ambros[z]ia" who died unmarried, at twenty.
+
+[83] Most kindly copied for me by the Rev. W. Hunt from Arthur Collins's
+_Sydney Papers_.
+
+[84] An agreeable phrase, not in the least obsolete, though I have known
+ignorant persons who thought it so. The "office" was that of Lord
+Chamberlain; the holder was Lord Howard of Effingham, afterwards famous
+in the Armada fights.
+
+[85] See _Kenilworth_ (chap. xvi.), where Scott brings him in as
+experiencing Gloriana's extreme uncertainty of temper.
+
+[86] _I.e._ a permanent one such as Hampton Court affords to some.
+
+[87] "About"?
+
+[88] Either by the Queen herself, whose touchiness is well known, or by
+jealous and mischief-making fellow courtiers.
+
+[89] "Sharing."
+
+[90] "Is grudged."
+
+[91] We should say "try."
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE CLIFFORD EARL OF CUMBERLAND
+(1558-1605)
+
+
+     This not very fortunate or wholly blameless but very
+     remarkable and representative person was the third holder of
+     the earldom and the sixteenth of the famous barony of
+     Clifford. He was great-grandson of Wordsworth's "Shepherd
+     Lord"; father of Anne Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and
+     Montgomery (pupil of Daniel the poet and a typical great
+     lady of her time); one of the foremost of Elizabeth's
+     privateering courtiers; one of the chief victims of her
+     caprice and parsimony; a magnificent noble, but a great
+     spendthrift, something of a libertine, never unkindly but
+     hardly ever wise. This remarkable deathbed letter (the
+     giving of which depended on the kindness of Dr. G. C.
+     Williamson of Hampstead, author of the _Life and Voyages of
+     G. Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland_, Cambridge University
+     Press, 1920, in which it appeared, p. 270-1), pretty well
+     explains itself. "Sweet Meg," his wife, was Lady Margaret
+     Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford. The pair were on
+     very affectionate terms for many years: but had latterly
+     been estranged by certain infidelities on the Earl's part
+     and by money disputes and difficulties, so that when his
+     last illness attacked him Lady Cumberland was not with him.
+     She was not, however, proof against this repentant appeal:
+     but returned with her daughter. Both were present at his
+     death in the Savoy soon after he wrote. He had made,
+     personally or by deputy, ten if not twelve voyages against
+     the Spaniards, and though there was a good deal of
+     mismanagement about them he took Porto Rico in one;
+     captured, but made little profit out of, an enormously
+     valuable prize, the _Madre de Dios_, in another; gave the
+     warning which enabled Lord Thomas Howard to escape, but
+     which Sir Richard Grenville refused to take "at Flores, in
+     the Azores"; and built at his own expense, the largest
+     privateer then or perhaps ever constructed, the _Malice
+     Scourge_--for the remarkable subsequent history of which,
+     see Mr. David Hannay's article, "_The Saga of a Ship_," in
+     _Blackwood_, May, 1921.
+
+
+6.
+
+Sweet and dear Meg,
+
+Bear[92] with, I pray thee, the short and unapt setting together of
+these my last lines, a token of true kindness, which I protest cometh
+out of an unfeigned heart of love to thee. For whose content, and to
+make satisfaction for the wrongs done to thee I have, since I saw thee
+more desired to return than for any other earthly cause. But being so
+low brought that, without God's miraculous favour, there is no great
+likelihood of it I, by this, if so it please God that I shall not, in
+earnestness make my last requests, which as ever thou lovest me lying
+so, I pray thee perform for me being dead. First, in greedy earnestness
+I desire thee not to offend God in grieving too much at His disposing of
+me: but let my assured hope that He hath done it for the saving of my
+soul rather comfort thee, considering that we ought most to rejoice,
+when we see a thing that it is either for the good of our souls or of
+our friends. And further I beg of thee that thou wilt take, as I have
+meant, in kindness the course I have set down for disposing of my estate
+and things left behind. Which truly, if I have not dealt most kindly
+with thee in, I am mistaken, and as ever thou lovest, (which I know thou
+hast done faithfully and truly) sweet Meg, let neither old conceit, new
+opinion, nor false lying tale, make thee fall to hard opinion nor suit
+with my brother. For this I protest now, when I tremble to speak that
+which upon any just colour may be turned to a lie, thou hast conceived
+wrong of him, for his nature is sweet, and though wrong conceit might
+well have urged him, yet he hath never to my knowledge said or done
+anything to harm thee or mine, but with tears hath often bemoaned
+himself to me that he could not devise how to make thee conceive rightly
+of him. And lastly, before the presence of God, I command thee, and in
+the nearest love of my heart I desire thee, to take great care that
+sweet Nan[93] whom God bless, may be carefully brought up in the fear of
+God, not to delight in worldly vanities, which I too well know be but
+baits to draw her out of the heavenly kingdom. And I pray thee thank thy
+kind uncle and aunt for her (?) and their many kindnesses to me. Thus,
+out of the bitter and greedy desire of a repentant heart, begging thy
+pardon for any wrong that ever in my life I did thee, I commend these my
+requests to thy wonted and undeserved kind wifely and lovely
+consideration, my body to God's disposing and my love (soul?) to His
+merciful commisseration.
+
+Thine as wholly as man was ever woman's,
+
+GEORGE CUMBERLAND.
+
+To my dear wife, the Countess of Cumberland, give this, of whom, from
+the bottom of my heart in the presence of God, I ask forgiveness for all
+the wrongs I have done her.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[92] There is, as often, little or no punctuation in the original, of
+which Dr. Williamson's beautiful book gives a facsimile. I have ventured
+to adjust that of the printed text, here and there, to bring out the
+meaning.
+
+[93] Lady Anne was at this time only 15. She seems to have been fond of
+her father and proud of him: nor is there any direct evidence that the
+fear of God was not in her. But she had no fear of man: and no excessive
+respect for her father's will. During the lives of her uncle Francis and
+her cousin Henry, 4th and 5th Earls, she fought it hard at law: and at
+last, Henry dying without issue, and the title lapsing, came into
+possession of the great Clifford estates in the North. She lived to be
+86, and was masterful all her days.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN DONNE (1573-1631)
+
+
+     "The first poet in the world for some things,"--as Ben
+     Jonson, who nevertheless did not like his metric, thought he
+     would perish for not being understood, and perhaps did not
+     understand him--called Donne with justice, might not be
+     thought likely to be among the first letter-writers. The
+     marvellous lightning-flashes of genius in a dark night of
+     context which illuminate his poetry and his sermons, can
+     hardly be expected--would indeed be almost out of place--in
+     ordinary letter-writing. Moreover, Donne is, perhaps, with
+     Browne, the most characteristic exponent of that magnificent
+     seventeenth century style which accommodates itself ill to
+     merely commonplace matters.
+
+     Browne, a younger man by an entire generation who lived far
+     into the age of Dryden, could drop this style when he chose:
+     with Donne it was rather the skin--if not even the very
+     flesh and bone and all but spirit--than the cloak of his
+     thought. Nevertheless there is no exact contemporary of
+     his--and certainly none possessing anything like his
+     literary power--who deserves selection as a representative
+     of his own school and time better than he does; and there is
+     something in him which adds distinction to any company in
+     which he appears. As mentioned in the Introduction, his
+     verse-epistles were even more noteworthy, but in prose he is
+     noteworthy enough.
+
+     The batch of letters here chosen was most fortunately
+     preserved by Izaak Walton, who published the first of them
+     _in_ the life not of Donne but of George Herbert, while the
+     rest were "added" to it in 1670.[94] The lady to whom they
+     were written, Magdalen Newport by maiden name, was mother
+     not only of the pious and poetical George, but of Edward
+     Lord Herbert of Cherbury, himself not a very bad poet but by
+     no means in the usual sense pious, a very great coxcomb, and
+     a hero chiefly by his own report. His mother, however, seems
+     to have been one of those "elect ladies" who were among the
+     chief glories of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+     centuries, and were fortunately numerous. After her
+     widowhood she lived at Oxford for some time, but seems to
+     have moved to London when Donne, about 1607, wrote these
+     letters. He was himself living at Mitcham (spelt "Michin" in
+     one letter), not yet famous for golf though perhaps already
+     for lavender. Later he visited her at Montgomery Castle, the
+     famous seat of the Herberts. She is said to have been very
+     beautiful, and the subtle touch of not in the least fatuous
+     or foppish "devotion" is most agreeable.
+
+
+7. TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+Madam,
+
+Your favours to me are everywhere. I use them, and have them. I enjoy
+them at London, and leave them there: and yet find them at Mitcham. Such
+riddles as these become things inexpressible: and such is your goodness.
+I was almost sorry to find your servant here this day, because I was
+loath to have any witness of my not coming home last night, and indeed
+of my coming this morning. But my not coming was excusable, because
+earnest business detained me; and my coming this day is by example of
+your St. Mary Magdalen, who rose early upon Sunday, to seek that which
+she loved most; and so did I. And, from her and myself, I return such
+thanks as are due to one, to whom we owe all the good opinion that they,
+whom we need most, have of us. By this messenger and on this good day, I
+commit the enclosed Holy Hymns and Sonnets--which for the matter not the
+workmanship have yet escaped the fire,--to your judgment and to your
+protection too, if you think them worthy of it; and I have appointed
+this enclosed Sonnet to usher them to your happy hand.
+
+      Your unworthiest servant unless your accepting
+      him to be so have mended him
+
+JO. DONNE.
+
+(MITCHAM July 11. 1607)
+
+TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT: OF ST. MARY MAGDALEN
+
+    Her of your name, whose fair inheritance
+      Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,
+    An active faith so highly did advance,
+      That she once knew, more than the church did know,
+    The Resurrection! so much good there is
+      Delivered of her, that some Fathers be
+    Loath to believe one woman could do this;
+      But think these Magdalens were two or three.
+    Increase their number, Lady, and their fame:
+      To their devotion, add your innocence;
+    Take so much of the example as the name
+      The latter half--and in some recompense
+    That they did harbour Christ Himself--a guest
+      Harbour these Hymns, to His dear Name addressed.
+
+
+8. TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+Madam,
+
+Every excuse hath in it somewhat of accusation; and since I am innocent,
+and yet must excuse, how shall I do for that part of accusing. By my
+troth, as desperate and perplexed men, grow from thence bold; so must I
+take the boldness of accusing you, who would draw so dark a Curtain
+betwixt me and your purposes, as that I had no glimmering, neither of
+your goings, nor the way which my Letters might haunt. Yet, I have given
+this Licence to Travel, but I know not whither, nor it. It is therefore
+rather a Pinnace to discover; and the entire Colony of Letters, of
+Hundreds and Fifties, must follow; whose employment is more honourable,
+than that which our State meditates to _Virginia_ because you are
+worthier than all that Country, of which that is a wretched inch; for
+you have better treasure and a harmlessness. If this sound like a
+flattery, tear it out. I am to my Letters as rigid a Puritan as Caesar
+was to his Wife. I can as ill endure a suspicious and misinterpretable
+word as a fault; and of the grossest flatteries there is this good use,
+that they tell us what we should be. But, _Madam_, you are beyond
+instruction, and therefore there can belong to you only praise; of
+which, though you be no good hearer, yet allow all my Letters leave to
+have in them one part of it, which is thankfulness towards you.
+
+_Your unworthiest Servant
+Except your accepting
+have mended him_
+
+JOHN DONNE.
+
+MITCHAM, July 11, 1607.
+
+
+9. _To the worthiest Lady, Mrs._ MAGDALEN HERBER(T)
+
+_Madam_,
+
+This is my second Letter, in which though I cannot tell you what is
+good, yet this is the worst, that I must be a great part of it; yet to
+me, that is recompensed, because you must be mingled. After I knew you
+were gone (for I must, little less than accusingly tell you, I knew not
+you would go) I sent my first Letter, like a _Bevis of Hampton_, to seek
+Adventures. This day I came to Town, and to the best part of it, your
+House; for your memory is a State-cloth and Presence; which I reverence,
+though you be away; though I need not seek that there which I have about
+and within me. There, though I found my accusation, yet anything to
+which your hand is, is a pardon; yet I would not burn my first Letter,
+because as in great destiny no small passage can be omitted or
+frustrated, so in my resolution of writing almost daily to you, I would
+have no link of the Chain broke by me, both because my Letters interpret
+one another, and because only their number can give them weight. If I
+had your Commission and Instructions to do you the service of a Legier
+Ambassador here, I could say something of the Countess of _Devon_: of
+the States, and such things. But since to you, who are not only a World
+alone, but the Monarchy of the World your self, nothing can be added,
+especially by me; I will sustain myself with the honour of being
+
+_Your Servant Extraordinary
+And without place_
+
+JOHN DONNE.
+
+LONDON
+July 23, 1607
+
+
+10. _To the worthiest Lady, Mrs_. MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+_Madam_,
+
+As we must die before we can have full glory and happiness, so before I
+can have this degree of it, as to see you by a Letter, I must almost
+die, that is, come to _London_, to plaguy _London_; a place full of
+danger, and vanity, and vice, though the Court be gone. And such it will
+be, till your return redeem it: Not that, the greatest virtue in the
+World, which is you, can be such a Marshal, as to defeat, or disperse
+all the vice of this place; but as higher bodies remove, or contract
+themselves, when better come, so at your return we shall have one door
+open to innocence. Yet, Madam, you are not such an Ireland, as produceth
+neither ill, nor good; no Spiders or Nightingales, which is a rare
+degree of perfection: But you have found and practised that experiment,
+That even nature, out of her detesting of emptiness, if we will make
+that our work to remove bad, will fill us with good things. To abstain
+from it, was therefore but the Childhood and Minority of your Soul,
+which hath been long exercised since, in your manlier active part, of
+doing good. Of which since I have been a witness and subject, not to
+tell you some times, that by your influence and example I have attained
+to such a step of goodness, as to be thankful, were both to accuse your
+power and judgment of impotency and infirmity.
+
+_Your Ladyship's in all Services_,
+
+JOHN DONNE.[95]
+
+August 2d, 1607.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] Mr. Gosse (who has inserted them in his _Life and Letters of
+Donne_) is perhaps right in putting letter 7 last. I give no opinion on
+this but merely keep the order in which they originally appeared in the
+text and in an appendix to the _Life of Herbert_ (1670 edit.). I am not
+certain to which "first" the "second" in letter 9 refers. "Bevis of
+Hampton" generally for "knight errant"; "Legier," a _resident_
+Ambassador; "States" in the plural--always then "the Dutch";
+_Snake_lessness is more often assigned to Ireland than spiderlessness.
+
+[95] The first of these letters, with the sonnet, appears, I think, in
+all editions of Walton, who has apparently entered the date wrongly. The
+other three were copied for me from the 1670 original by Miss Elsie
+Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a few spellings in them.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES HOWELL (1593-1666)
+
+
+     "The Father" of something is an expression in the history of
+     literature which has become, more justly than some other
+     traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind.
+     For in the first place it is an irritatingly conventional
+     phrase, and in the second the paternity is usually
+     questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the
+     Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters)
+     calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of
+     all such as in English write unofficial letters "for
+     publication."[96] He wrote a great deal else: and would no
+     doubt in more recent times have been a "polygraphic"
+     journalist of some distinction. And he had plenty to write
+     about. He was an Oxford man; he travelled abroad on
+     commercial errands (though by no means as what has been more
+     recently called a "commercial traveller"); he was one of Ben
+     Jonson's "sons," a Royalist sufferer from the Rebellion, and
+     finally Historiographer Royal as well as Clerk to the
+     Council. His letters, which are sometimes only titularly
+     such[97] but sometimes quite natural, deal with all sorts of
+     subjects--from the murder of Buckingham by Felton to the
+     story of the Oxenham "White Bird" which Kingsley has
+     utilised in _Westward Ho!_ And, to do him justice, there is
+     a certain character about the book which is not _merely_ the
+     expression of the character of the writer, though no doubt
+     connected with it. Now the possession of this is what makes
+     a book literature. It has been usual to select from Howell's
+     letters of travel, and from historical ones like the
+     Buckingham one above mentioned. I have preferred the "White
+     Bird"; and before it one of several documents, of the same
+     or nearly the same period, which deal with the old English
+     life of country houses--between the mediaeval time and the
+     degradation of the "servant" class, which came in with the
+     eighteenth century or a little earlier. Howell would
+     evidently have echoed Isopel Berners--that admirable girl
+     whom George Borrow slighted--in saying, "Long Melford for
+     ever!" though the house would not with him, as with her,
+     have meant a workhouse. Neither letter seems to require
+     annotation.
+
+
+11. TO DAN CALDWELL, ESQ., FROM THE LORD SAVAGE'S HOUSE IN LONG MELFORD
+
+My dear Dan,
+
+Tho' considering my former condition of life, I may now be called a
+countryman, yet you cannot call me a rustic (as you would imply in your
+letter) as long as I live in so civil and noble a family, as long as I
+lodge in so virtuous and regular a house as any, I believe, in the land,
+both for economical government and the choice company; for I never saw
+yet such a dainty race of children in all my life together. I never saw
+yet such an orderly and punctual attendance of servants, nor a great
+house so neatly kept; here one shall see no dog, nor a cat, nor cage to
+cause any nastiness within the body of the house. The kitchen and
+gutters and other offices of noise and drudgery are at the fag-end;
+there's a back-gate for the beggars and the meaner sort of swains to
+come in at; the stables butt upon the park, which, for a cheerful rising
+ground, for groves and browsings for the deer, for rivulets of water,
+may compare with any of its bigness in the whole land; it is opposite
+to the front of the great house, whence from the gallery one may see
+much of the game when they are a-hunting. Now for the gardening and
+costly choice flowers, for ponds, for stately large walks green and
+gravelly, for orchards and choice fruits of all sorts, there are few the
+like in England; here you have your Bon Chrétien pear and Burgamot in
+perfection; your Muscadel grapes in such plenty that there are some
+bottles of wine sent every year to the King: and one Mr. Daniel, a
+worthy gentleman hard by who hath been long abroad, makes good store in
+his vintage. Truly this house of Long Melford tho' it be not so great,
+yet is so well compacted and contriv'd with such dainty conveniences
+every way; that if you saw the landskip of it, you would be mightily
+taken with it and it would serve for a choice pattern to build and
+contrive a house by. If you come this summer to your Manor of Sheriff in
+Essex, you will not be far off hence; if your occasions will permit, it
+will be worth your coming hither, tho' it be only to see him, who would
+think it a short journey to go from St. David's Head to Dover Cliffs to
+see and serve you, were there occasion; if you would know who the same
+is, 'tis--
+
+Yours,
+
+J. H.
+
+20. May, 1619.
+
+
+12. TO MR. E. D.
+
+Sir,
+
+I thank you a thousand times for the noble entertainment you gave me at
+Bury; and the pains you took in showing me the antiquities of that
+place. In requital, I can tell you of a strange thing I saw lately here,
+and I believe 'tis true. As I passed by St. Dunstan's in Fleet Street
+the last Saturday, I stepped into a lapidary, or stone-cutter's shop,
+to treat with the master for a stone to be put upon my father's tomb;
+and casting my eyes up and down, I might spy a huge marble with a large
+inscription upon't, which was thus to my best remembrance:
+
+     _Here lies _John Oxenham_, a goodly young man, in whose
+     chamber, as he was struggling with the pangs of death, a
+     bird with a white breast was seen fluttering about his bed,
+     and so vanished._
+
+     _Here lies also _Mary Oxenham_, the sister of the said
+     _John_, who died the next day, and the said apparition was
+     seen in the room._
+
+Then another sister is spoke of, then,
+
+     _Here lies hard by _James Oxenham_, the son of the said
+     _John_, who died a child in his cradle a little after; and
+     such a bird was seen fluttering about his head, a little
+     before he expired, which vanished afterwards._
+
+At the bottom of the stone there is:
+
+     _Here lies _Elizabeth Oxenham_ the mother of the said
+     _John_, who died sixteen years since, when such a bird with
+     a white breast was seen about her bed before her death._
+
+To all these there be divers witnesses, both squires and ladies, whose
+names are engraven upon the stone. This stone is to be sent to a town
+hard by Exeter, where this happened. Were you here, I could raise a
+choice discourse with you hereupon. So, hoping to see you the next term,
+to requite some of your favours,
+
+I rest--
+
+Your true friend to serve you,
+
+J. H.
+
+WESTMINSTER, 3 July. 1632
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[96] _Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters_ (1657).
+
+[97] Indeed his correspondents are probably sometimes, if not always,
+imaginary: and many of the letters are only what in modern periodicals
+are called "middle" articles on this and that subject, headed and tailed
+with the usual letter-formulas.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN EVELYN (1620-1706)
+
+
+     As is naturally the case with writers of "Diaries,"
+     "Memoirs," "Autobiographies," and the like, a good deal of
+     matter is deflected into Evelyn's famous _Diary_ from
+     possible letters: while his numerous and voluminous
+     published works may also to some extent abstract from or
+     duplicate his correspondence. But there is enough of
+     this[98] to make him a noteworthy epistoler. And it is
+     interesting, though not perhaps surprising, to find that
+     while his Diary is less piquant than his friend Mr. Pepys's,
+     his letters are more so. Not surprising--first, because
+     official letter-writers (Evelyn did a good deal of public
+     work but was never _exactly_ an official) often get into a
+     habit of noncommittal; and secondly, because there is, in
+     these things as in others, a principle of compensation.
+     Evelyn was almost sure to be a good letter-writer[99] for he
+     had a ready pen, a rather extraordinary range of interests
+     and capacities, plenty of time and means, extensive
+     knowledge of the world, and last but not least, a
+     tendency--not missed by the aforesaid Mr. Pepys--to bestow
+     his information and opinion freely upon less fortunately
+     endowed and equipped mortals. If he never quite reaches in
+     letters the famous passages of the Diary, describing the
+     great Fire, and Whitehall on the eve of Charles the Second's
+     mortal seizure, he sometimes comes near to this, and
+     diffuses throughout a blend of humanism, and humanity, of
+     science and art, which is very agreeable. His wife also was
+     no mean letter-writer, but only one of the minor stars of
+     that day round the moon, Dorothy Osborne, to whom we come
+     next. Of Evelyn's own letters several are specially
+     tempting. His curious plan (a particularly favourite craze
+     of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) for a small
+     "college" or lay convent of ladies and gentlemen, a sort of
+     miniature "Abbey of Thelema" is one. His magnificent eulogy
+     of the Duchess of Newcastle (Lamb's "dear Margaret"), which
+     puzzled his editor Bray (from this and other notes a rather
+     stupid man), is another: and his very interesting letter to
+     Pepys on Dreams (Oct. 4, 1689) a third. But on the whole I
+     have preferred the following, which may remind some readers
+     of Mr. Kipling's charming poem on the wonderful things our
+     fathers did and believed, with its invaluable reminder that
+     after all it would be lucky for us if we were no worse than
+     they. The date is not given: but the letter is printed
+     between one of August and one of September, 1668. [Greek:
+     kollourion] = Collyrium = "eyewash." "Stillatim" = "drop by
+     drop." "Lixivium" (Fr. "lessive") = "lye," "soapwater."
+     "Catoptrics" and "otacoustics" (though the "ot" = "ear" has
+     gone)--are fairly modern words, "phonocamptics" scarcely so.
+     In fact, I do not remember seeing it elsewhere. It does not
+     appear to be a classical Greek compound, but should mean
+     "the art of guiding and managing the voice."[100] The Tom
+     Whittal story shows that Evelyn, though given to
+     seriousness, could (God rest his soul) be a merry man
+     sometimes. The other proper names, from Mr. Oldenburg to
+     Thom. Fazzello, could be expounded without difficulty, but
+     with unnecessary expenditure of space.
+
+
+13. JOHN EVELYN TO DOCTOR BEALE
+
+Sir,
+
+I happened to be with Mr Oldenburg some time since, almost upon the
+article of his receiving the notice you sent him of your fortunate and
+useful invention; and I remember I did first of all incite him, both to
+insert it into his next transactions, and to provoke your further
+prosecution of it; which I exceedingly rejoice to find has been so
+successful, that you give us hopes of your further thoughts upon that,
+and those other subjects which you mention. You may haply call to
+remembrance a passage of the Jesuit Honorati Fabri, who speaking of
+perspectives, observes, that an object looked on through a small hole
+appears magnified; from whence he suggests, the casting of two plates
+neatly perforated, and fitted to look through, preferable to glasses,
+whose refractions injure the sight. Though I begin to advance in years
+(being now on the other side of forty), yet the continuance of the
+perfect use of my senses (for which I bless Almighty God) has rendered
+me the less solicitous about those artificial aids; which yet I foresee
+I must shortly apply myself to, and therefore you can receive but
+slender hints from me which will be worthy your acceptance upon that
+argument; only, I well remember, that besides Tiberius of old (whom you
+seem to instance in), Joseph Scaliger affirms the same happened both to
+his father Julius and himself, in their younger years. And sometimes,
+methinks, I myself have fancied to have discerned things in a very dark
+place, when the curtains about my bed have been drawn, as my hands,
+fingers, the sheet, and bedclothes; but since my too intent poring upon
+a famous eclipse of the sun, about twelve years since, at which time I
+could as familiarly have stared with open eyes upon the glorious planet
+in its full lustre, as now upon a glow-worm (comparatively speaking), I
+have not only lost the acuteness of sight, but much impaired the vigour
+of it for such purposes as it then served me. But besides that, I have
+treated mine eyes very ill near these twenty years, during all which
+time I have rarely put them together, or composed them to sleep, before
+one at night, and sometimes much later: that I may in some sort redeem
+my losses by day, in which I am continually importuned with visits from
+my neighbours and acquaintance, or taken up by other impertinencies of
+my life in this place. I am plainly ashamed to tell you this,
+considering how little I have improved myself by it; but I have rarely
+been in bed before twelve o'clock as I said, in the space of twenty
+years; and yet I read the least print, even in a jolting coach, without
+other assistance, save that I now and then used to rub my shut eye-lids
+over with a spirit of wine well rectified, in which I distil a few
+rosemary flowers much after the process of the Queen of Hungary's water,
+which does exceedingly fortify, not only my sight, but the rest of my
+senses, especially my hearing and smelling; a drop or two being
+distilled into the nose or ears, when they are never so dull; and other
+[Greek: kollourion] I never apply. Indeed, in the summer time, I have
+found wonderful benefit in bathing my head with a decoction of some hot
+and aromatical herbs, in a lixivium made of the ashes of vine branches;
+and when my head is well washed with this, I immediately cause abundance
+of cold fountain water to be poured upon me _stillatim_, for a good
+half-hour together; which for the present is not only one of the most
+voluptuous and grateful refreshments imaginable, but an incredible
+benefit to me the whole year after: for I never need other powdering to
+my hair, to preserve it bright and clean, as the gallants do; but which
+does certainly greatly prejudice transpiration by filling up, or lying
+heavy upon the pores. Those, therefore, who (since the use of perukes)
+accustom to wash their heads, instead of powdering, would doubtless find
+the benefit of it; both as to the preventing of aches in their head,
+teeth, and ears, if the vicissitude and inconstancy of the weather, and
+consequently the use of their monstrous perukes, did not expose them to
+the danger of catching colds. When I travelled in Italy, and the
+Southern parts, I did sometimes frequent the public baths (as the manner
+is), but seldom without peril of my life, till I used this frigid
+effusion, or rather profusion of cold water before I put on my garments,
+or durst expose myself to the air; and for this method I was obliged to
+the old and noble Rantzow, in whose book _De conservandâ valetudine_ I
+had read a passage to this purpose; though I might have remembered how
+the Dutchmen treated their labouring horses when they are all over in a
+froth, which they wash off with several buckets of cold water, as I have
+frequently observed it in the Low Countries.
+
+Concerning other aids; besides what the masters of the catoptrics,
+phonocamptics, otacoustics, &c., have done, something has been attempted
+by the Royal Society; and you know the industrious Kircher has much
+laboured. The rest of those artificial helps are summed up by the Jesuit
+And. Schottus. I remember that Monsieur Huygens (author of the
+pendulum), who brought up the learned father of that incomparable youth
+Monsieur de Zulichem, who used to prescribe to me the benefit of his
+little wax taper (a type whereof is, with the history of it, in some of
+our Registers) for night elucubrations, preferable to all other candle
+or lamp light whatsoever. And because it explodes all glaring of the
+flame, which by no means ought to dart upon the eyes, it seems very much
+to establish your happy invention of tubes instead of spectacles, which
+have not those necessary defences.
+
+Touching the sight of cats in the night, I am not well satisfied of the
+exquisiteness of that sense in them. I believe their smelling or hearing
+does much contribute to their dexterity in catching mice, as to all
+those animals who are born with those prolix smelling hairs. Fish will
+gather themselves in shoals to any extraordinary light in the dark
+night, and many are best caught by that artifice. But whatever may be
+said of these, and other senses of fish, you know how much the sagacity
+of birds and beasts excel us; how far eagles and vultures, ravens and
+other fowls will smell the carcase; _odorumque canum vis_, as Lucretius
+expresses it, and we daily find by their drawing after the games. Gesner
+affirms that an otter will wind a fish four miles distance in the water,
+and my Lord Verulam (cent. 8) speaks of that element's being also a
+medium of sounds, as well as air. Eels do manifestly stir at the
+cracking of thunder, but that may also be attributed to some other
+tremulous motion; yet carps and other fish are known to come at the call
+and the sound of a bell, as I have been informed. Notorious is the story
+of Arion, and of Lucullus's lampreys which came _ad nomen_; and you have
+formerly minded me of Varro's Greek pipe, of which Lucian and Cicero (ad
+Atticum) take occasion to speak. Pliny's dolphin is famous, and what is
+related of the American Manati: but the most stupendous instance, that
+of the xiphia or sword-fish, which the Mamertines can take up by no
+other strategem than a song of certain barbarous words, as the thing is
+related by Thom. Fazzello. It is certain that we hear more accurately
+when we hold our mouths a little open, than when we keep them shut; and
+I have heard of a dumb gentleman in England who was taught to speak (and
+therefore certainly brought to hear in some degree) by applying the head
+of a base viol against his teeth, and striking upon the strings with the
+bow. You may remember the late effect of the drum extending the tympanum
+of a deaf person to great improvement of his hearing, so long as that
+was beaten upon; and I could at present name a friend of mine, who
+though he be exceedingly thick of hearing, by applying a straight stick
+of what length soever, provided it touch the instrument and his ear,
+does perfectly and with great pleasure hear every tune that is played:
+all which, with many more, will flow into your excellent work, whilst
+the argument puts me in mind of one Tom Whittal, a student of Christ
+Church, who would needs maintain, that if a hole could dexterously be
+bored through the skull to the brain in the midst of the forehead, a man
+might both see and hear and smell without the use of any other organs;
+but you are to know, that this learned problematist was brother to him,
+who, preaching at St. Mary's, Oxford, took his text out of the history
+of Balaam, Numb. xxii., "Am I not thine ass?" Dear Sir, pardon this
+rhapsody of,
+
+Sir, your, &c.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[98] Some 400 pages from and to him in the most compendious edition.
+
+[99] He thought, writing to Lord Spencer about 1690, that we have "few
+tolerable letters of our own country" excepting--and that only in a
+fashion--those of Bacon, Donne and Howell.
+
+[100] "_Odorumque canum vis_--as Lucretius expresses it"--perhaps
+requires a note. Evelyn ought to have known his Lucretius, the first
+book of which he translated and which he was only prevented from
+completing by some foolish scruples which Jeremy Taylor wisely but
+vainly combated. And Lucretius is fond of _vis_ as meaning "quality" or
+"faculty." But Evelyn almost certainly was thinking also, more or less,
+of Virgil's "odora canum vis," _Aen._ iv. 132.
+
+
+
+
+DOROTHY OSBORNE (1627-1695)
+
+
+     This very delightful lady--who became the wife of Sir
+     William Temple, famous in political and literary history,
+     and, by so doing or being, mistress of the household in
+     which Swift lived, suffered, but met Stella--was the
+     daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, one of the stoutest of
+     Royalists who, as Governor of Guernsey, held its Castle
+     Cornet for years against the rebels. Whether she was (in
+     1627) born there--her father had been made _Lieutenant_
+     Governor six years earlier--is not known and has been
+     thought unlikely: but the present writer (who has danced,
+     and played whist within its walls) hopes she was. When we
+     come to know her she was living at Chicksands in
+     Bedfordshire and hoping to marry Temple, though the course
+     of love ran by no means smooth. Attention was first drawn to
+     her letters, and some of them were partly printed, in
+     Courtenay's _Life_ of her husband--a book which was reviewed
+     by Macaulay in a famous essay, not overlooking Dorothy. But
+     as a body, they waited till some half century later, when
+     they were published by Judge Parry and received with joy by
+     all fit folk. They were written between 1652 and 1654. The
+     first passage is in her pleasant mood and touches on a
+     subject--aviation--which interested that day and interests
+     this. The second strikes some people as one of the most
+     charming specimens of the love-letter--written neither in
+     the violent delight that has violent end, nor in namby-pamby
+     fashion.[101]
+
+
+
+14. TO SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
+
+Sir,--
+
+You say I abuse you; and Jane says you abuse me when you say you are not
+melancholy: which is to be believed? Neither, I think; for I could not
+have said so positively (as it seems she did) that I should not be in
+town till my brother came back: he was not gone when she writ, nor is
+not yet; and if my brother Peyton had come before his going, I had
+spoiled her prediction. But now it cannot be; he goes on Monday or
+Tuesday at farthest. I hope you did truly with me, too, in saying that
+you are not melancholy (though she does not believe it). I am thought
+so, many times, when I am not at all guilty on't. How often do I sit in
+company a whole day, and when they are gone am not able to give an
+account of six words that was said, and many times could be so much
+better pleased with the entertainment my own thoughts give me, that 'tis
+all I can do to be so civil as not to let them see they trouble me. This
+may be your disease. However, remember you have promised me to be
+careful of yourself, and that if I secure what you have entrusted me
+with, you will answer for the rest. Be this our bargain then; and look
+that you give me as good an account of one as I shall give you of
+t'other. In earnest I was strangely vexed to see myself forced to
+disappoint you so, and felt your trouble and my own too. How often I
+have wished myself with you, though but for a day, for an hour: I would
+have given all the time I am to spend here for it with all my heart.
+
+You could not but have laughed if you had seen me last night. My brother
+and Mr. Gibson were talking by the fire; and I sat by, but as no part of
+the company. Amongst other things (which I did not at all mind), they
+fell into a discourse of flying; and both agreed it was very possible to
+find out a way that people might fly like birds, and despatch their
+journeys: so I, that had not said a word all night, started up at that,
+and desired they would say a little more on't, for I had not marked the
+beginning; but instead of that, they both fell into so violent a
+laughing, that I should appear so much concerned in such an art; but
+they little knew of what use it might have been to me. Yet I saw you
+last night, but 'twas in a dream; and before I could say a word to you,
+or you to me, the disorder my joy to see you had put me into awakened
+me. Just now I was interrupted, too, and called away to entertain two
+dumb gentlemen;--you may imagine whether I was pleased to leave my
+writing to you for their company;--they have made such a tedious visit,
+too; and I am so tired with making of signs and tokens for everything I
+had to say. Good God! how do those that live with them always? They are
+brothers; and the eldest is a baronet, has a good estate, a wife and
+three or four children. He was my servant heretofore, and comes to see
+me still for old love's sake; but if he could have made me mistress of
+the world I could not have had him; and yet I'll swear he has nothing to
+be disliked in him but his want of tongue, which in a woman might have
+been a virtue.
+
+I sent you a part of _Cyrus_ last week, where you will meet with one
+Doralise in the story of Abradate and Panthée. The whole story is very
+good; but the humour makes the best part of it. I am of her opinion in
+most things that she says in her character of "L'honnest homme" that she
+is in search of, and her resolution of receiving no heart that had been
+offered to anybody else. Pray, tell me how you like her, and what fault
+you find in my Lady Carlisle's letter? Methinks the hand and the style
+both show her a great person, and 'tis writ in the way that's now
+affected by all that pretend to wit and good breeding; only, I am a
+little scandalized to confess that she uses that word faithful,--she
+that never knew how to be so in her life.
+
+I have sent you my picture because you wished for it; but, pray, let it
+not presume to disturb my Lady Sunderland's. Put it in some corner where
+no eyes may find it out but yours, to whom it is only intended. 'Tis not
+a very good one, but the best I shall ever have drawn of me; for, as my
+Lady says, my time for pictures is past, and therefore I have always
+refused to part with this, because I was sure the next would be a worse.
+There is a beauty in youth that every one has once in their lives; and I
+remember my mother used to say there was never anybody (that was not
+deformed) but were handsome, to some reasonable degree, once between
+fourteen and twenty. It must hang with the light on the left hand of it;
+and you may keep it if you please till I bring you the original. But
+then I must borrow it (for 'tis no more mine, if you like it), because
+my brother is often bringing people into my closet where it hangs, to
+show them other pictures that are there; and if he miss this long
+thence, 'twould trouble his jealous head.
+
+
+15.
+
+Sir,--
+
+Who would be kind to one that reproaches one so cruelly? Do you think,
+in earnest, I could be satisfied the world should think me a dissembler,
+full of avarice or ambition? No, you are mistaken; but I'll tell you
+what I could suffer, that they should say I married where I had no
+inclination, because my friends thought it fit, rather than that I had
+run wilfully to my own ruin in pursuit of a fond passion of my own. To
+marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of the
+thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for an example
+that it may be done and not repented afterwards. Is there anything
+thought so indiscreet, or that makes one more contemptible? 'Tis true
+that I do firmly believe we should be, as you say, _toujours les
+mesmes_; but if (as you confess) 'tis that which hardly happens once in
+two ages, we are not to expect the world should discern we were not like
+the rest. I'll tell you stories another time, you return them so
+handsomely upon me. Well, the next servant I tell you of shall not be
+called a whelp, if 'twere not to give you a stick to beat myself with. I
+would confess that I looked upon the impudence of this fellow as a
+punishment upon me for my over care in avoiding the talk of the world;
+yet the case is very different, and no woman shall ever be blamed that
+an inconsolable person pretends to her when she gives no allowance to
+it, whereas none shall 'scape that owns a passion, though in return of a
+person much above her. The little tailor that loved Queen Elizabeth was
+suffered to talk out, and none of her Council thought it necessary to
+stop his mouth; but the Queen of Sweden's kind letter to the King of
+Scots was intercepted by her own ambassador, because he thought it was
+not for his mistress's honour (at least that was his pretended reason),
+and thought justifiable enough. But to come to my Beagle again. I have
+heard no more of him, though I have seen him since; we meet at Wrest
+again. I do not doubt but I shall be better able to resist his
+importunity than his tutor was; but what do you think it is that gives
+him his encouragement? He was told I had thought of marrying a gentleman
+that had not above two hundred pound a year, only out of my liking to
+his person. And upon that score his vanity allows him to think he may
+pretend as far as another. Thus you see 'tis not altogether without
+reason that I apprehend the noise of the world, since 'tis so much to my
+disadvantage.
+
+Is it in earnest that you say your being there keeps me from the town?
+If so, 'tis very unkind. No, if I had gone, it had been to have waited
+on my neighbour, who has now altered her resolution and goes not
+herself. I have no business there, and am so little taken with the place
+that I could sit here seven years without so much as thinking once of
+going to it. 'Tis not likely, as you say, that you should much persuade
+your father to what you do not desire he should do; but it is hard if
+all the testimonies of my kindness are not enough to satisfy without my
+publishing to the world that I can forget my friends and all my interest
+to follow my passion; though, perhaps, it will admit of a good sense,
+'tis that which nobody but you or I will give it, and we that are
+concerned in't can only say 'twas an act of great kindness and something
+romance, but must confess it had nothing of prudence, discretion, nor
+sober counsel in't. 'Tis not that I expect, by all your father's offers,
+to bring my friends to approve it. I don't deceive myself thus far, but
+I would not give them occasion to say that I hid myself from them in the
+doing it; nor of making my action appear more indiscreet than it is. It
+will concern me that all the world should know what fortune you have,
+and upon what terms I marry you, that both may not be made to appear ten
+times worse than they are. 'Tis the general custom of all people to make
+those that are rich to have more mines of gold than are in the Indies,
+and such as have small fortunes to be beggars. If an action take a
+little in the world, it shall be magnified and brought into comparison
+with what the heroes or senators of Rome performed; but, on the
+contrary, if it be once condemned, nothing can be found ill enough to
+compare it with; and people are in pain till they find out some
+extravagant expression to represent the folly on't. Only there is this
+difference, that as all are more forcibly inclined to ill than good,
+they are much apter to exceed in detraction than in praises. Have I not
+reason then to desire this from you; and may not my friendship have
+deserved it? I know not; 'tis as you think; but if I be denied it, you
+will teach me to consider myself. 'Tis well the side ended here. If I
+had not had occasion to stop there, I might have gone too far, and
+showed that I had more passions than one. Yet 'tis fit you should know
+all my faults, lest you should repent your bargain when 'twill not be in
+your power to release yourself; besides, I may own my ill-humour to you
+that cause it; 'tis the discontent my crosses in this business have
+given me makes me thus peevish. Though I say it myself, before I knew
+you I was thought as well an humoured young person as most in England;
+nothing displeased, nothing troubled me. When I came out of France,
+nobody knew me again. I was so altered, from a cheerful humour that was
+always alike, never over merry but always pleased, I was grown heavy and
+sullen, froward and discomposed; and that country which usually gives
+people a jolliness and gaiety that is natural to the climate, had
+wrought in me so contrary effects that I was as new a thing to them as
+my clothes. If you find all this to be sad truth hereafter, remember
+that I gave you fair warning.
+
+Here is a ring: it must not be at all wider than this, which is rather
+too big for me than otherwise; but that is a good fault, and counted
+lucky by superstitious people. I am not so, though: 'tis indifferent
+whether there be any word in't or not; only 'tis as well without, and
+will make my wearing it the less observed. You must give Nan leave to
+cut a lock of your hair for me, too. Oh, my heart! what a sigh was
+there! I will not tell you how many this journey causes; nor the fear
+and apprehensions I have for you. No, I long to be rid of you, am afraid
+you will not go soon enough: do not you believe this? No, my dearest, I
+know you do not, whatever you say, you cannot doubt that I am yours.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[101] The second passage needs little annotation except that Wrest, in
+Bedfordshire, where Dorothy met her importunate lover, was the seat of
+Anthony Grey, Earl of Kent. There is said to be a picture there of Sir
+William Temple--a copy of Lely's. Wrest Park is only a few miles from
+Chicksands. In the first "Lady Carlisle" is Lucy Percy or Hay, a "_great
+person_" in many ways--beauty, rank, wit, influence etc.--but hardly a
+good one. As for "Doralise" Dorothy is quite right. She is one of the
+brightest features of the huge _Grand Cyrus_. Perhaps it may be just
+necessary to remind readers that "servant" constantly = "lover"; that
+"side" refers to the sheet of paper she is using; and that "abuse" =
+"deceive," not "misuse" or "vituperate."
+
+
+
+
+JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
+
+
+     The Introduction has dealt rather more fully with Swift than
+     with some others: and a further reference to a dominant
+     influence or conflict of influences on his letters will be
+     found below in the head-note on Thackeray. But a little more
+     may be said here. It is rather unfortunate that we have not
+     more _early_ letters from him (we have some, if only
+     fragments, from Thackeray, and they are no small "light").
+     We should like some concerning that curious career at
+     Trinity College, Dublin, which was ended _speciali gratia_,
+     leaving the usual wranglers to their usual wrangle whether
+     the last word meant "grace" or "_dis_grace." Others, written
+     in various moods from the time when Sir William Temple
+     "spoiled a fine gentleman," and Esther Johnson set running a
+     life-long course of _un_-smooth love, would be more welcome
+     still. They would no doubt be stumbling-blocks to those apt
+     to stumble, just as the existing epistles are: but they
+     would be stepping-stones for the wise. As it is, we have to
+     do without them and perhaps, like most things that are, it
+     is better. For the stumblers are saved the sin of stumbling,
+     and the wise men the nuisance of seeing them do it, and
+     trying to set them right. And there might have been only
+     more painful revelations of the time when, to adjust the
+     words of the famous epitaph "fierce indignation still
+     _could_ lacerate the heart," that had felt so fondly and so
+     bitterly what it had to feel.
+
+     What follows is characteristic enough[102] and intelligible
+     enough to those who will give their intelligence fair play,
+     asking only for information of _facts_. These latter can be
+     supplied at no great length even to those who are
+     unacquainted with Swift's biography. "M. D." is the pet name
+     for Stella, and her rather mysterious companion Mrs. Dingley
+     who lived with her in Dublin and played something like the
+     part of the alloys which are used in experimenting with some
+     metals.[103] "Presto" is Swift himself. "Prior" is the poet.
+     "Sir A. Fountaine" was a Norfolk squire and a great
+     collector of artistic things, most of which were sold not
+     very long ago. "Sterne" (John) was an Irish clergyman and
+     afterwards a bishop, but not of the same family as the
+     novelist. "Cousin _Dryden_ Leach" reminds us that Swift was
+     also a cousin of Dryden the poet. "Oroonoko" refers to Afra
+     Behn's introduction of the "noble savage" to English
+     interest. "Patrick" was Swift's very unsatisfactory
+     man-servant. "Bernage" a French Huguenot refugee. "George
+     Granville," of the family of the hero of the _Revenge_, was
+     a great Tory, a peer a little later with the title of
+     Lansdowne, and a rather better poet than Johnson thought
+     him. "St. John" and "Harley," if not also "Masham," should
+     not need annotation. Notice the seven, (literally seven!)
+     leagued word at the end. Swift calls their attention to it
+     when beginning his next instalment.
+
+
+16. TO STELLA
+
+LONDON, January 16, 1710-11.
+
+O faith, young women, I have sent my letter N. 13, without one crumb of
+an answer to any of MD's; there's for you now; and yet Presto ben't
+angry faith, not a bit, only he will begin to be in pain next Irish
+post, except he sees MD's little hand-writing in the glass frame at the
+bar of St James's Coffeehouse, where Presto would never go but for that
+purpose. Presto's at home, God help him, every night from six till bed
+time, and has as little enjoyment or pleasure in life at present as any
+body in the world, although in full favour with all the ministry. As
+hope saved, nothing gives Presto any sort of dream of happiness, but a
+letter now and then from his own dearest MD. I love the expectation of
+it, and when it does not come, I comfort myself, that I have it yet to
+be happy with. Yes, faith, and when I write to MD, I am happy too; it is
+just as if methinks you were here, and I prating to you, and telling you
+where I have been: Well, says you, Presto, come, where have you been
+to-day? come, let 's hear now. And so then I answer; Ford and I were
+visiting Mr Lewis, and Mr Prior, and Prior has given me a fine Plautus,
+and then Ford would have had me dine at his lodgings, and so I would
+not; and so I dined with him at an eating-house; which I have not done
+five times since I came here; and so I came home, after visiting Sir
+Andrew Fountaine's mother and sister, and Sir Andrew Fountaine is
+mending, though slowly.
+
+17. I was making, this morning, some general visits, and at twelve I
+called at the coffeehouse for a letter from MD; so the man said he had
+given it to Patrick; then I went to the Court of Requests and Treasury
+to find Mr Harley, and after some time spent in mutual reproaches, I
+promised to dine with him; I staid there till seven, then called at
+Sterne's and Leigh's to talk about your box, and to have it sent by
+Smyth. Sterne says he has been making inquiries, and will set things
+right as soon as possible. I suppose it lies at Chester, at least I hope
+so, and only wants a lift over to you. Here has little Harrison been to
+complain, that the printer I recommended to him for his Tatler is a
+coxcomb; and yet to see how things will happen; for this very printer is
+my cousin, his name is Dryden Leach; did you never hear of Dryden Leach,
+he that prints the Postman? He acted Oroonoko, he's in love with Miss
+Cross.--Well, so I came home to read my letter from Stella, but the dog
+Patrick was abroad; at last he came, and I got my letter; I found
+another hand had superscribed it; when I opened it, I found it written
+all in French, and subscribed Bernage: faith, I was ready to fling it at
+Patrick's head. Bernage tells me, had been to desire your recommendation
+to me to make him a captain; and your cautious answer, "That he had as
+much power with me as you," was a notable one; if you were here, I would
+present you to the ministry as a person of ability. Bernage should let
+me know where to write to him; this is the second letter I have had
+without any direction; however, I beg I may not have a third, but that
+you will ask him, and send me how I shall direct to him. In the mean
+time, tell him, that if regiments are to be raised here, as he says, I
+will speak to George Granville, Secretary at War, to make him a captain;
+and use what other interest I conveniently can. I think that is enough,
+and so tell him, and don't trouble me with his letters when I expect
+them from MD; do you hear, young women, write to Presto.
+
+18. I was this morning with Mr Secretary St John, and we were to dine
+at Mr Harley's alone, about some business of importance, but there
+were two or three gentlemen there. Mr Secretary and I went together
+from his office to Mr Harley's, and thought to have been very wise;
+but the deuce a bit: the company staid, and more came, and Harley went
+away at seven, and the Secretary and I staid with the rest of the
+company till eleven; I would then have had him come away, but he was
+in for't; and though he swore he would come away at that flask, there
+I left him. I wonder at the civility of these people; when he saw I
+would drink no more, he would always pass the bottle by me, and yet I
+could not keep the toad from drinking himself, nor he would not let me
+go neither, nor Masham, who was with us. When I got home I found a
+parcel directed to me, and opening it, I found a pamphlet written
+entirely against myself, not by name, but against something I writ: it
+is pretty civil, and affects to be so, and I think I will take no
+notice of it; 'tis against something written very lately; and indeed I
+know not what to say, nor do I care; and so you are a saucy rogue for
+losing your money to-day at Stoyte's; to let that bungler beat you, fy
+Stella, an't you ashamed? well, I forgive you this once, never do so
+again; no, noooo. Kiss and be friends, sirrah.--Come, let me go sleep;
+I go earlier to bed than formerly; and have not been out so late these
+two months; but the secretary was in a drinking humour. So good night,
+myownlittledearsaucyinsolentrogues.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[102] As such, it has commended itself to other selectors. But
+duplication, though it has been sedulously avoided here, is sometimes
+almost inevitable.
+
+[103] _I.e._ the part of facilitating the operation, and disappearing in
+the results aimed at.
+
+
+
+
+LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU (1689-1762)
+
+
+     The ratio of importance between life and letters varies a
+     good deal with different writers: and the circumstances of
+     the life have seldom been of more importance to the letter
+     than in the case of "Lady Mary"--Pierrepont as she was born.
+     When she was a girl she held an unusual place in the house
+     of her widowed father the Duke of Kingston. Her courtship
+     by, or with, or of (one doubts as to the preposition) Edward
+     Wortley-Montagu, a descendant of Pepys's Lord Sandwich, had
+     peculiarities, and her marriage with him more. She was a
+     sort of pet at George the First's court; she went with her
+     husband to Constantinople as Ambassadress; she introduced
+     inoculation into England; she was, under imperfectly known
+     circumstances, first the idol and then the abomination of
+     Pope; she lived for more than twenty years in France and
+     Italy, having left her husband without, apparently, any
+     quarrel between them; and she only came home in 1761 to die
+     next year. Like her predecessor as Queen of letter-writers,
+     Madame de Sévigné (to whom she was amusingly and rather
+     femininely unjust), she had a favourite daughter (who became
+     Lady Bute[104]); but, unlike her, she had a most
+     objectionable son who was apparently half mad. There was,
+     however, not the slightest madness about Lady Mary--in fact,
+     most of the objectors (perhaps unjust ones) to her have
+     held that her head was very much better than her heart. Her
+     most popular letters have usually been the Turkish ones,
+     and, at the other end of her life, her Italian descriptions:
+     but selections almost invariably pitch on the curious early
+     one in which she, so to speak, "proposes" to her future
+     husband rather more than, or at least as much as, she
+     accepts his proposal. I prefer, both as less popularised and
+     as more unique still, the following most business-like[105]
+     plan and programme of an elopement. Like Mr. Foker's fight
+     with the post-boy it "didn't come off" as first planned; but
+     Fortune favoured it later.
+
+
+17. TO MR. WORTLEY-MONTAGU
+
+Saturday morning (August, 1712)
+
+I writ you a letter last night in some passion. I begin to fear again; I
+own myself a coward.--You made no reply to one part of my letter
+concerning my fortune. I am afraid you flatter yourself that my F.
+[father] may be at length reconciled and brought to reasonable terms. I
+am convinced, by what I have often heard him say, speaking of other
+cases like this, he never will. The fortune he has engaged to give with
+me, was settled on my B. [brother's] marriage, on my sister and on
+myself; but in such a manner, that it was left in his power to give it
+all to either of us, or divide it as he thought fit. He has given it
+all to me. Nothing remains for my sister, but the free bounty of my F.
+[father] from what he can save; which, notwithstanding the greatness of
+his estate, may be very little. Possibly after I have disobliged him so
+much, he may be glad to have her so easily provided for, with money
+already raised; especially if he has a design to marry himself, as I
+hear. I do not speak this that you should not endeavour to come to terms
+with him, if you please; but I am fully persuaded it will be to no
+purpose. He will have a very good answer to make:--that I suffered this
+match to proceed; that I made him make a very silly figure in it; that I
+have let him spend £400 in wedding-cloaths; all which I saw without
+saying any thing. When I first pretended to oppose this match, he told
+me he was sure I had some other design in my head; I denied it with
+truth. But you see how little appearance there is of that truth. He
+proceeded with telling me that he never would enter into treaty with
+another man, &c., and that I should be sent immediately into the North
+to stay there; and, when he died, he would only leave me an annuity of
+£400. I had not courage to stand this view, and I submitted to what he
+pleased. He will now object against me,--why, since I intended to marry
+in this manner, I did not persist in my first resolution; that it would
+have been as easy for me to run away from T. [Thoresby] as from hence;
+and to what purpose did I put him, and the gentleman I was to marry, to
+expences, &c.? He will have a thousand plausible reasons for being
+irreconcileable, and 'tis very probable the world will be of his side.
+Reflect now for the last time in what manner you must take me. I shall
+come to you with only a night-gown and petticoat, and that is all you
+will get with me. I told a lady of my friends what I intend to do. You
+will think her a very good friend when I tell you she has proffered to
+lend us her house if we would come there the first night. I did not
+accept of this till I had let you know it. If you think it more
+convenient to carry me to your lodgings, make no scruple of it. Let it
+be where it will: if I am your wife I shall think no place unfit for me
+where you are. I beg we may leave London next morning, wherever you
+intend to go. I should wish to go out of England if it suits with your
+affairs. You are the best judge of your father's temper. If you think it
+would be obliging to him, or necessary for you, I will go with you
+immediately to ask his pardon and his blessing. If that is not proper at
+first, I think the best scheme is going to the Spa. When you come back,
+you may endeavour to make your father admit of seeing me, and treat with
+mine (though I persist in thinking it will be to no purpose). But I
+cannot think of living in the midst of my relations and acquaintance
+after so unjustifiable a step:--unjustifiable to the world,--but I think
+I can justify myself to myself. I again beg you to hire a coach to be at
+the door early Monday morning, to carry us some part of our way,
+wherever you resolve our journey shall be. If you determine to go to
+that lady's house, you had better come with a coach and six at seven
+o'clock tomorrow. She and I will be in the balcony that looks on the
+road: you have nothing to do but to stop under it, and we will come down
+to you. Do in this what you like best. After all, think very seriously.
+Your letter, which will be waited for, is to determine everything. I
+forgive you a coarse expression in your last, which, however, I wish had
+not been there. You might have said something like it without expressing
+it in that manner; but there was so much complaisance in the rest of it
+I ought to be satisfied. You can shew me no goodness I shall not be
+sensible of. However, think again, and resolve never to think of me if
+you have the least doubt, or that it is likely to make you uneasy in
+your fortune. I believe to travel is the most likely way to make a
+solitude agreeable, and not tiresome: remember you have promised it.
+
+'Tis something odd for a woman that brings nothing to expect anything;
+but after the way of education, I dare not pretend to live but in some
+degree suitable to it. I had rather die than return to a dependancy upon
+relations I have disobliged. Save me from that fear if you love me. If
+you cannot, or think I ought not to expect it, be sincere and tell me
+so. 'Tis better I should not be yours at all, than, for a short
+happiness, involve myself in ages of misery. I hope there will never be
+occasion for this precaution; but, however, 'tis necessary to make it. I
+depend entirely on your honour, and I cannot suspect you of any way
+doing wrong. Do not imagine I shall be angry at any thing you can tell
+me. Let it be sincere; do not impose on a woman that leaves all things
+for you.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[104] The likeness, however, ended with the favouritism: for Madame de
+Grignan, in spite of good looks and good wits, was apparently detested
+by everybody, except her mother, and deserved it: while nobody has
+anything to say against Lady Bute.
+
+[105] It is, of course, not _merely_ business-like--the mixture of
+something else makes it rather fascinating. They were curiously fond of
+elopements in the eighteenth century, Sheridan's satire in _The Rivals_
+having ample justification. Nor was this merely due to the more severe
+exercise of paternal authority. For they often preferred (as the
+philosophical parent of the celebrated Mrs. Greville remarked when his
+daughter ran away with Mr. G.) to "get out of the window when there was
+not the slightest objection to their passing through the door."
+
+
+
+
+PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF
+CHESTERFIELD (1694-1773)
+
+
+     As was suggested in the Introduction, where perhaps enough
+     has been said of his actual letters, the fourth Earl of
+     Chesterfield is too commonly known, or rather _mis_known,
+     only by Johnson's refusal of his patronage and condemnation
+     of his manners and morals, by Dickens's caricature, and by
+     Thackeray's not untrue but merely fragmentary sketch of him
+     as a gambler. Therefore, though these preliminary notes are
+     not as a rule biographical, this may be one of the
+     exceptions; for his life was anything but that of a mere
+     idler and _grand Seigneur_. He entered the House of Commons
+     before he was of age, and had much to do with political and
+     literary as well as Court society before, in 1725, he
+     succeeded to the peerage. A year or two afterwards he went
+     as ambassador to the Hague, a post which he held, doing some
+     important business, for four years. On coming home he became
+     a formidable opponent of Walpole, and at one time led the
+     opposition in the Upper House. He was a most successful
+     Viceroy in Ireland at the difficult period of the "'45," and
+     a judicious "Secretary for the North" after it. He conducted
+     the reform of the Calendar through Parliament, and only gave
+     up active participation in home politics because of his
+     increasing deafness. In foreign affairs he was an adroit and
+     successful diplomatist, and made an early and remarkably
+     clear-sighted anticipation of the French Revolution. It is
+     not extravagant to say that, if he had had his fortune and
+     position to make, he might have been one of the foremost
+     men of his time in politics or letters or both; and that he
+     was not far below such rank in either. The following letter
+     is one of the most characteristic of those at which it has
+     been the fashion to sneer. All one can say of it is, "What a
+     blessing it would be if a good many people in the twentieth
+     century, and in places varying from the streets to the House
+     of Commons, would obey at least some of its precepts!"
+
+
+18. LORD CHESTERFIELD TO HIS SON
+
+LONDON. Sept. 22, O.S., 1749
+
+Dear Boy,
+
+If I had faith in philters and love potions, I should suspect that you
+had given Sir Charles Williams some, by the manner in which he speaks of
+you, not only to me, but to everybody else. I will not repeat to you
+what he says of the extent and correctness of your knowledge, as it
+might either make you vain, or persuade you that you had already enough
+of what nobody can have too much. You will easily imagine how many
+questions I asked and how narrowly I sifted him upon your subject: he
+answered me, and I daresay with truth, just as I could have wished;
+till, satisfied entirely with his accounts of your character and
+learning, I inquired into other matters, intrinsically indeed of less
+consequence, but still of great consequence to every man, and of more to
+you than to almost any man; I mean, your address, manners and air. To
+these questions, the same truth which he had observed before, obliged
+him to give me much less satisfactory answers. And, as he thought
+himself in friendship both to you and me, obliged to tell me the
+disagreeable as well as the agreeable truths, upon the same principle I
+think myself obliged to repeat them to you.
+
+He told me, then, that in company you were frequently most _provokingly_
+inattentive, absent, and _distrait_. That you came into a room, and
+presented yourself very awkwardly; that at table you constantly threw
+down knives, forks, napkins, bread, etc., and that you neglected your
+person and dress, to a degree unpardonable at any age, and much more so
+at yours.
+
+These things, however immaterial soever they may seem to people who do
+not know the world and the nature of mankind, give me, who know them to
+be exceedingly material, very great concern. I have long distrusted you,
+and therefore frequently admonished you upon these articles; and I tell
+you plainly, that I shall not be easy till I hear a very different
+account of them. I know of no one thing more offensive to a company,
+than that inattention and _distraction_. It is showing them the utmost
+contempt; and people never forgive contempt. No man is _distrait_ with
+the man he fears, or the woman he loves; which is a proof that every man
+can get the better of that _distraction_ when he thinks it worth his
+while to do so; and, take my word for it, it is always worth his while.
+For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with
+an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he
+shows me no contempt; whereas the absent man, silently indeed, but very
+plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.
+Besides, can an absent man make any observations upon the characters,
+customs, and manners of the company? No. He may be in the best companies
+of his lifetime (if they will admit him, which, if I were they, I would
+not), and never be one jot the wiser. I never will converse with an
+absent man; one may as well talk with a deaf one. It is, in truth, a
+practical blunder, to address ourselves to a man, who we see plainly
+neither hears, minds, nor understands us. Moreover, I aver that no man
+is, in any degree, fit for either business or conversation, who cannot,
+and does not, direct and command his attention to the present object, be
+that what it will.
+
+You know, by experience, that I grudge no expense in your education, but
+I will positively not keep you a flapper. You may read, in Dr. Swift,
+the description of these flappers, and the use they were of to your
+friends the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) are so taken up with
+intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the
+discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon
+the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those people who are
+able to afford it, always keep a flapper in their family, as one of
+their domestics, nor ever walk about, or make visits, without him. This
+flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his
+walks, and, upon occasion, to give a soft flap upon his eyes; because he
+is always so wrapt up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of
+falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post,
+and, in the streets, of jostling others, or being jostled into the
+kennel himself. If _Christian_ will undertake this province into the
+bargain, with all my heart; but I will not allow him any increase of
+wages upon that score.
+
+In short, I give you fair warning, that when we meet, if you are absent
+in mind, I will soon be absent in body; for it will be impossible for me
+to stay in the room; and if at table you throw down your knife, plate,
+bread, etc., and hack the wing of a chicken for half an hour, without
+being able to cut it off, and your sleeve all the time in another dish,
+I must rise from table to escape the fever you would certainly give me.
+Good God! How I should be shocked if you came into my room, for the
+first time, with two left legs, presenting yourself with all the graces
+and dignity of a tailor, and your clothes hanging upon you like those in
+Monmouth Street, upon tenter-hooks! Whereas I expect, nay require, to
+see you present yourself with the easy and gentle air of a man of
+fashion who has kept good company. I expect you not only well dressed,
+but very well dressed; I expect a gracefulness in all your motions, and
+something particularly engaging in your address. All this I expect, and
+all these it is in your power, by care and attention, to make me find;
+but, to tell you the plain truth, if I do not find it, we shall not
+converse very much together; for I cannot stand inattention and
+awkwardness; it would endanger my health.
+
+You have often seen, and I have as often made you observe, L[yttelton]'s
+distinguished inattention and awkwardness. Wrapped up like a Laputan in
+intense thought, and possibly sometimes in no thought at all--which, I
+believe, is very often the case with absent people--he does not know his
+most intimate acquaintance at sight, or answers them as if they were at
+cross purposes. He leaves his hat in one room, his sword in another, and
+would leave his shoes in a third, if his buckles, although awry, did not
+save them; his legs and arms, by his awkward management of them, seem to
+have undergone the _question extraordinaire_; and his head, always
+hanging upon one or other of his shoulders, seems to have received the
+first stroke upon a block. I sincerely value and esteem him for his
+parts, learning, and virtue; but, for the soul of me, I cannot love him
+in company. This will be universally the case, in common life, of every
+inattentive awkward man, let his real merit and knowledge be ever so
+great.
+
+When I was of your age, I desired to shine, as far as I was able, in
+every part of life; and was as attentive, to my manners, my dress, and
+my air, in company on evenings, as to my books, and my tutor in the
+mornings. A young fellow should be ambitious to shine in everything;
+and, of the two, rather overdo than underdo. These things are by no
+means trifles; they are of infinite consequence to those who are to be
+thrown into the great world, and who would make a figure or a fortune in
+it. It is not sufficient to deserve well, one must please well too.
+Awkward, disagreeable merit, will never carry anybody far. Wherever you
+find a good dancing master, pray let him put you upon your haunches; not
+so much for the sake of dancing, as for coming into a room and
+presenting yourself genteelly and gracefully. Women, whom you ought to
+endeavour to please, cannot forgive a vulgar and awkward air and
+gestures; _il leur faut du brillant_. The generality of men are pretty
+like them, and are equally taken by the same exterior graces.
+
+I am very glad that you have received the diamond buckles safe: All I
+desire in return for them, is, that they may be buckled even upon your
+feet, and that your stockings may not hide them. I should be sorry you
+were an egregious fop; but I protest that, of the two, I would rather
+have you a fop than a sloven. I think negligence in my own dress, even
+at my age, when certainly I expect no advantages from my dress, would be
+indecent with regard to others. I have done with fine clothes; but I
+will have my plain clothes fit me, and made like other people's. In the
+evenings I recommend to you the company of women of fashion, who have a
+right to attention, and will be paid it. Their company will smooth your
+manners, and give you a habit of attention and respect; of which you
+will find the advantage among men.
+
+My plan for you, from the beginning, has been to make you shine, equally
+in the learned and in the polite world; The former part is almost
+completed to my wishes, and will, I am persuaded, in a little time more,
+be quite so. The latter part is still in your power to complete; and I
+flatter myself that you will do it, or else the former part will avail
+you very little; especially in your deportment, where the exterior
+address and graces do half the business; they must be harbingers of your
+merit, or your merit will be very coldly received: all can, and do judge
+of the former, few of the latter.
+
+Mr. Harte tells me that you have grown very much since your illness: if
+you get up to five feet ten, or even nine inches, your figure will,
+probably, be a good one; and if well dressed and genteel, will probably
+please; which is a much greater advantage to a man than people commonly
+think. Lord Bacon calls it a letter of recommendation.
+
+I would wish you to be an _omnis homo_, _l'homme universel_. You are
+nearer it, if you please, than ever anybody was at your age; and if you
+will but, for the course of this next year only, exert your whole
+attention to your studies in the morning, and to your address, manners,
+air, and _tournure_ in the evenings, you will be the man I wish you, and
+the man that is rarely seen.
+
+Our letters go, at best, so irregularly and so often miscarry totally,
+that, for greater security, I repeat the same things. So, though, I
+acknowledged by last post Mr Harte's letter of the 8th September, N.S.,
+I acknowledge it again by this to you. If this should find you still at
+Verona, let it inform you, that I wish you to set out soon for Naples;
+unless Mr. Harte should think it better for you to stay at Verona, or
+any other place on this side Rome, till you go there for the Jubilee.
+Nay, if he likes it better, I am very willing that you should go
+directly from Verona to Rome; for you cannot have too much of Rome,
+whether upon account of the language, the curiosities, or the company.
+My only reason for mentioning Naples, is for the sake of the climate,
+upon account of your health; but, if Mr. Harte thinks your health is now
+so well restored as to be above climate, he may steer your course
+wherever he thinks proper; and, for aught I know, your going directly to
+Rome, and consequently staying there so much the longer, may be as well
+as anything else. I think you and I cannot put our affairs into better
+hands than in Mr. Harte's; and I will take his infallibility against the
+Pope's, with some odds on his side. _A propos_ of the Pope; remember to
+be presented to him before you leave Rome, and go through the necessary
+ceremonies for it, whether of kissing his slipper or...; for I would
+never deprive myself of anything I wanted to do or see, by refusing to
+comply with an established custom. When I was in Catholic countries, I
+never declined kneeling in their churches at the elevation, nor
+elsewhere, when the Host went by. It is a complaisance due to the custom
+of the place, and by no means, as some silly people have imagined, an
+implied approbation of their doctrine. Bodily attitudes and situations
+are things so very indifferent in themselves, that I would quarrel with
+nobody about them. It may indeed be improper for Mr. Harte to pay that
+tribute of complaisance, upon account of his character.
+
+This letter is a very long, and possibly a very tedious one; but my
+interest for your perfection is so great, and particularly at this
+critical and decisive period of your life, that I am only afraid of
+omitting, but never of repeating, or dwelling too long upon anything
+that I think may be of the least use to you. Have the same anxiety for
+yourself that I have for you, and all will do well. Adieu, my dear
+child!
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BALLARD (1706-1755)
+
+
+     The extreme wickedness of reviewers has been a conviction
+     with many authors--who have sometimes, it would seem,
+     succumbed to it themselves and retaliated in reviewing
+     others. The following letter to Dr. Lyttelton, Dean of
+     Exeter, is a very early (1753) and not unamusing example of
+     this conviction: and is given as such, though the writer has
+     no wide fame. His history is, however, interesting and
+     shows, among other things, how entirely erroneous is the
+     idea that till recently (and even now to some extent)
+     opportunities of showing themselves able to profit by
+     education were and are denied to the "lower classes" in
+     England. Ballard was apprenticed to a staymaker
+     ("habit-maker" as others say) at Chipping-Campden, but
+     betook himself in his leisure hours to the study of
+     Anglo-Saxon. Hearing of which fact the gentlemen of the
+     local hunt (the boozy squire-tyrants of popular tradition)
+     subscribed for an annuity of £100 a year to him, but he
+     would only accept £60. With this he went up to Oxford to
+     enjoy the Bodleian, was made a "clerk" at Magdalen and later
+     an esquire-bedell to the University. He did much good work
+     of the antiquarian kind, and died a year or two after
+     writing this letter, having (one hopes) relieved himself by
+     his protest and been consoled by a kind answer from
+     Lyttelton.[106]
+
+
+
+19. TO DR. LYTTELTON, DEAN OF EXETER
+
+A DEFENCE OF THE HISTORY OF LEARNED LADIES
+
+Revd. and Hond. Sir,
+
+My best acknowledgments are due for the favour of two epistles; the
+first of which I received a few minutes after my last set forward for
+Exeter. I would have answered it immediately, but that I thought a
+little respite might be agreeable, before I gave you the trouble of
+another long letter.
+
+The day before I received your first epistle, a Gent. of my acquaintance
+brought me the _Monthly Review_ for February, that I might see what the
+candid and genteel authors of that work had said of mine. They observe
+to the publick, that _I have said_ C. Tishem was so skilled in the Greek
+Tongue, that she could read Galen in its original, which very few
+Physicians are able to do. Whether this was done maliciously, in order
+to bring the wrath of the Æsculapians upon me, or inadvertently, I
+cannot say: but I may justly affirm, that they have used me very ill in
+that affair; since if they had read with attention, which they ought to
+have done before they attempted to give a character of the Book, they
+must have known that the whole account of that lady (which is but one
+page) is not mine, but borrowed with due acknowledgment from the
+_General Dictionary_. They are likewise pleased to inform the world
+that I have been rather too industrious in the undertaking, having
+introduced several women who hardly deserved a place in the work. I did
+not do this for want of materials; neither did I do it rashly, without
+advising with others of superior judgment in those affairs, of which
+number Mr. Professor Ward was one. But those pragmatical Censors seem to
+have but little acquaintance with those studies, or otherwise they might
+have observed that all our general Biographers, as Leland, Bale, Pits,
+Wood, and Tanner, have trod the very same steps; and have given an
+account of all the authors they could meet with, good and bad, just as
+they found them: and yet, I have never heard of anyone that had courage
+or ill-nature enough, to endeavour to expose them for it. While I was
+ruminating on these affairs, three or four letters came to my hands, and
+perceiving one of them come from my worthy friend the Dean of Exeter, I
+eagerly broke it open, and was perfectly astonished to find myself
+charged with _party zeal_ in my book; and that from thence the most
+candid reader might conclude the author to be both a Church and State
+Tory. But after having thoroughly considered all the passages objected
+to, and not finding the least tincture of either Whig or Tory principles
+contained in them, I began to cheer up my drooping spirits, in hopes
+that I might possibly out-live my supposed crime; but, alas! to my still
+greater confusion! when I opened my next letter from a Tory
+acquaintance, I was like one thunderstruck at the contents of it. He
+discharges his passionate but ill-grounded resentment upon me most
+furiously. He tells me, he did not imagine Magdalen College could have
+produced such a rank Whig. He reproaches me with want of due esteem for
+the Stuart Family, to whom he says I have shewn a deadly hatred, and he
+gives me, as he imagines, three flagrant instances of it. 1. That I have
+unseasonably and maliciously printed a letter of Queen Elizabeth's, in
+order to blacken the memory of Mary Queen of Scots, and that too, at a
+time when her character began to shine as bright as the Sun. 2dly. That
+I have endeavoured to make her memory odious, by representing her as
+wanting natural affection to her only son, in my note at p. 162, where
+he says I have printed part of a Will, &c. And 3dly, tho' she was cut
+off in such a barbarous and unprecedented manner, yet she has fallen
+unlamented by me. I am likewise charged with having an affection to
+Puritanism; the reasons for which are, my giving the Life of a Puritan
+Bishop's Lady, which it seems need not have been done by me, had I not
+had a particular regard for her, since it had been done before by
+Goodwin who reprinted her Devotions. And not content with this, I have
+blemished my book with the memoirs of a Dissenting teacher's wife, and
+have been kind enough to heighten even the character given her by her
+indulgent husband: and that I am very fond of quoting Fox and Burnet
+upon all occasions. These are thought strong indications of the
+above-mentioned charge. It may be thought entirely unnecessary to answer
+any of the objections from Exeter, after having given you this Summary
+of my kind Friend's Candid Epistle; but to you, Sir, to whom I could
+disclose the very secrets of my soul, I will endeavour to say a word or
+two upon this subject, and make you my Confessor upon this occasion; and
+I will do it with as much sincerity, as if I lay on my death-bed. Before
+I was fourteen years old, I read over Fox's Acts and Monuments of the
+Church, and several of the best books of Polemical Divinity, which
+strongly fortified me in the Protestant Religion; and gave me the
+greatest abhorrence to Popery. And soon after I perused Mercurius
+Rusticus, The Eleventh Persecution, Lloyd, Walker's Sufferings of the
+Clergy, and many others, which gave me almost as bad an opinion of the
+Dissenters. But then I learned in my childhood _to live in Charity with
+all Men_, and I have used my best endeavours to put this doctrine in
+practice all my life long. I never thought ill, or quarrelled with any
+man merely because he had been educated in principles different to mine;
+and yet I have been acquainted with many papists, dissenters, &c. and if
+I found any of them learned, ingenuous, and modest, I always found my
+heart well-disposed for contracting a firm friendship with them: and
+notwithstanding that, I dare believe that all those people will, with
+joint consent, vouch for me, that I have ever been steady in my own
+principles.
+
+I can truly affirm that never any one engaged in such a work, with an
+honester heart, or executed it with more unbiassed integrity, than I
+have done. And indeed, I take the unkind censures passed upon me by the
+furious uncharitable zealots of both parties, to be the strongest proof
+of it. And after all, I dare challenge any man, whether Protestant,
+Papist, or Dissenter, Whig or Tory, (and I have drawn up and published
+memoirs of women who professed all those principles) to prove me guilty
+of partiality, or to shew that I have made any uncharitable reflections
+on any person, and whenever that is done, I will faithfully promise to
+make a public recantation. I wish, Sir, you would point out to me any
+one unbecoming word or expression which has fell from me on Bishop
+Burnet. Had I had the least inclination to have lessened his character,
+I did not want proper materials to have done it. I have in my possession
+two original letters from Bishop Gibson and Mr Norris of Bemerton, to
+Dr Charlett, which, if published, would lessen your too great esteem for
+him. And what, I beseech you, Sir, have I said in praise of Mrs Hopton
+and her pious and useful labours, which they do not well deserve, and
+which can possibly give any just offence to any good man? I dare not
+censure or condemn a good thing merely because it borders upon the
+Church of Rome. I rather rejoice that she retains any thing I can fairly
+approve. Should I attempt to do this, might I not condemn the greater
+part of our Liturgy, &c.? and should I not stand self-condemned for so
+doing? I cannot for my life perceive that I have said any thing of that
+excellent woman, which she does not merit; and I must beg leave to say
+that I think her letter to F. Turbeville deserves to be wrote in letters
+of gold, and ought to be carefully read and preserved by all
+Protestants. Mary Queen of Scots fell under my notice, no otherwise than
+as a learned woman. The affairs you mention would by no means suit my
+peaceable temper. I was too well acquainted with the warm disputes, and
+fierce engagement both of domestic and foreign writers on that head,
+once to touch upon the subject. And indeed, unless I had been the happy
+discoverer of some secret springs of action which would have given new
+information to the public, it would have been excessive folly in me to
+intermeddle in an affair of so tender a nature, and of so great
+importance.
+
+I have often blamed my dear friend Mr. Brome for destroying his valuable
+collections, but I now cease to wonder at it. He spent his leisure hours
+pleasantly and inoffensively, and when old age came on, which not only
+abates thirst, but oftentimes gives a disrelish to these and almost all
+other things, which do not help to make our passage into eternity more
+easy, he then destroyed them (I dare believe) in order to prevent the
+malicious reflections of an ill-natured world.
+
+I have always been a passionate lover of History and Antiquity,
+Biography, and Northern Literature: and as I have ever hated idleness,
+so I have in my time filled many hundred sheets with my useless
+scribble, the greater part of which I will commit to the flames shortly,
+to prevent their giving me any uneasiness in my last moments.[107]
+
+[May 22, 1753.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[106] Ballard's _Memoirs of Learned Ladies of Great Britain who have
+been celebrated for their writings or skill in the Learned Languages
+Arts & Sciences_, appeared at Oxford in 4to (1752) and 8vo (1775). It
+contains some sixty lives, the most noteworthy names being those of
+Queens Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Countess
+of Richmond (_the_ "Lady Margaret"), the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady
+Winchelsea, the two Countesses of Pembroke ("Sidney's sister" and Anne
+Clifford), Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners, Dryden's Anne Killigrew,
+Dorothy Pakington (the alleged author of _The Whole Duty of Man_), and
+"the matchless Orinda."
+
+[107] Perhaps a note should be added on "Mrs. Hopton" and "F.
+Turbe(r)ville." The former, born Susanna Harvey (1627-1709), was the
+wife of a Welsh judge, and wrote devotional works. The latter, Henry T.
+(d. 1678: the "F" of text is of course "Father"), was a writer of
+doctrinal and controversial manuals on the Roman side.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)
+
+
+     The chief thing to add to what has been said of Gray in the
+     Introduction is something that may draw attention to a
+     curious feature of his letters, not there distinctly
+     noticed. Letters, it must be sufficiently seen even from
+     this little book, have a curious _variety_ of relation to
+     the characters, personal and literary, of their writers.
+     Sometimes they show us phases entirely or almost entirely
+     concealed in the published works; sometimes again, without
+     definitely revealing new aspects, they complete and enforce
+     the old; while, in yet a third, though perhaps the smallest,
+     class of instances, they are as it were results of the same
+     governing formula as that of the published works themselves,
+     the difference lying almost wholly in the subjects and in
+     the methods and circumstances of treatment. Gray belongs to
+     this last division. There is not, of course, in his letters
+     the same severity of discipline and restriction of
+     utterance, that we find in his poems. But that, in letters,
+     was impossible--at least in letters that should supply
+     tolerable reading. Yet the same general principle, which was
+     somewhat exaggerated in the phrase about his "never speaking
+     out," appears in them. There is always a certain restraint
+     (at least in all that have been published) and it would
+     probably have extended in proportion to others, however
+     little their subject might seem compatible with it. In what
+     we have it gives a curious _seasoning_--something which
+     preserves as well as flavours like salt or vinegar. Of those
+     which follow the first is an early one. Mason's apologetic
+     note is to the effect that it "may appear whimsical" but it
+     gives him an opportunity of remarking that Mr. Gray was
+     "extremely skilled in the customs of the ancient Romans,"
+     both utterances being characteristic, to some extent of the
+     time but to a greater of the writer. The second letter, to
+     Gray's most intimate friend Dr. Wharton, and more than a
+     quarter of a century later, is a good example of the
+     _variety_ of these epistles--scenery, literature, politics,
+     science, gossip and what not, being all dealt with.
+
+
+20. TO RICHARD WEST [EXTRACT]
+
+ROME, May, 1740.
+
+I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal fatigued; for you know
+the Appian is somewhat tiresome. We dined at Pompey's; he indeed was
+gone for a few days to his Tusculan, but, by the care of his Villicus,
+we made an admirable meal. We had the dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock,
+a dish of thrushes, a noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and
+some conchylia of the Lake with garum sauce: For my part I never eat
+better at Lucullus's table. We drank half-a-dozen cyathi a-piece of
+ancient Alban to Pholoë's health; and after bathing, and playing an hour
+at ball, we mounted our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the
+temple. The priests there entertained us with an account of a wonderful
+shower of bird's eggs that had fallen two days before, which had no
+sooner touched the ground, but they were converted into gudgeons; as
+also that, the night past, a dreadful voice had been heard out of the
+Adytum, which spoke Greek during a full half-hour, but nobody understood
+it. But quitting my Romanities, to your great joy and mine, let me tell
+you in plain English, that we come from Albano. The present town lies
+within the inclosure of Pompey's Villa in ruins. The Appian way runs
+through it, by the side of which, a little farther, is a large old
+tomb, with five pyramids upon it, which the learned suppose to be the
+burying-place of the family, because they do not know whose it can be
+else. But the vulgar assure you it is the sepulchre of the Curiatii, and
+by that name (such is their power) it goes. One drives to Castle
+Gandolfo, a house of the Pope's, situated on the top of one of the
+Collinette, that forms a brim to the basin, commonly called the Alban
+lake. It is seven miles round; and directly opposite to you, on the
+other side, rises the Mons Albanus, much taller than the rest, along
+whose side are still discoverable (not to common eyes) certain little
+ruins of the old Alba Longa. They had need be very little, as having
+been nothing but ruins ever since the days of Tullus Hostilius. On its
+top is a house of the Constable Colonna's, where stood the temple of
+Jupiter Latialis. At the foot of the hill Gandolfo, are the famous
+outlets of the lake, built with hewn stone, a mile and a half under
+ground. Livy you know, amply informs us of the foolish occasion of this
+expence, and gives me this opportunity of displaying all my erudition,
+that I may appear considerable in your eyes. This is the prospect from
+one window of the palace. From another you have the whole Campagna, the
+City, Antium, and the Tyrrhene sea (twelve miles distant) so
+distinguishable, that you may see the vessels sailing upon it. All this
+is charming. Mr. Walpole says, our memory sees more than our eyes in
+this country. Which is extremely true; since, for realities, Windsor or
+Richmond Hill is infinitely preferable to Albano or Frescati. I am now
+at home, and going to the window to tell you it is the most beautiful of
+Italian nights, which, in truth, are but just begun (so backward has the
+spring been here, and every where else, they say) There is a moon! there
+are stars for you! Do not you hear the fountain? Do not you smell the
+orange flowers? That building yonder is the convent of S. Isidore; and
+that eminence, with the cypress trees and pines upon it, the top of M.
+Quirinal. This is all true, and yet my prospect is not two hundred yards
+in length.
+
+
+21. TO WHARTON
+
+Dear Doctor
+
+Whatever my pen may do, I am sure my thoughts expatiate nowhere oftener
+or with more pleasure, than to Old-Park. I hope you have made my peace
+with Miss Deborah. it is certain, whether her name were in my letter or
+not, she was as present to my memory, as the rest of the little family,
+& I desire you would present her with two kisses in my name, & one
+a-piece to all the others: for I shall take the liberty to kiss them all
+(great & small) as you are to be my proxy.
+
+In spite of the rain, w^ch I think continued with very short intervals
+till the beginning of this month, & quite effaced the summer from the
+year, I made a shift to pass May & June not disagreeably in Kent. I was
+surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury, which (I know not
+why) had not struck me in the same manner before. The whole country is a
+rich and well-cultivated garden, orchards, cherry-grounds, hop-gardens,
+intermix'd with corn & frequent villages, gentle risings cover'd with
+wood, and everywhere the Thames and Medway breaking in upon the
+Landscape with all their navigation. It was indeed owing to the bad
+weather, that the whole scene was dress'd in that tender emerald-green,
+w^ch one usually sees only for a fortnight in the opening of spring, &
+this continued till I left the country. My residence was eight miles
+east of Canterbury in a little quiet valley on the skirts of
+Barhamdown. In these parts the whole soil is chalk, and whenever it
+holds up, in half an hour it is dry enough to walk out. I took the
+opportunity of three or four days fine weather to go into the Isle of
+Thanet, saw Margate (w^ch is Bartholomew-Fair by the sea side),
+Ramsgate, & other places there, and so came by Sandwich, Deal, Dover,
+Folkstone, & Hithe, back again. The coast is not like Hartlepool: there
+are no rocks, but only chalky cliffs of no great height, till you come
+to Dover. There indeed they are noble & picturesque, and the opposite
+coasts of France begin to bound your view, w^ch was left before to range
+unlimited by anything but the horizon: yet it is by no means a
+_shipless_ sea, but everywhere peopled with white sails & vessels of all
+sizes in motion. And take notice (except in the Isle, w^ch is all
+corn-fields, and has very little inclosure) there are in all places
+hedgerows & tall trees even within a few yards of the beach.
+Particularly Hithe stands on an eminence cover'd with wood. I shall
+confess we had fires of a night (ay, & a day too) several times even in
+June: but don't go & take advantage of this, for it was the most
+untoward year that ever I remember.
+
+Your Friend Rousseau (I doubt) grows tired of M^r Davenport and
+Derbyshire. He has picked a quarrel with David Hume & writes him letters
+of 14 pages Folio upbraiding him of all his _noirceurs_. Take one only
+as a specimen, he says, that at Calais they chanced to sleep in the same
+room together, & that he overheard David talking in his sleep, and
+saying, _Ah! Je le tiens, ce Jean-Jacques là._ In short (I fear) for
+want of persecution & admiration (for these are real complaints) he will
+go back to the Continent.
+
+What shall I say to you about the Ministry? I am as angry as a
+Common-council Man of London about my L^d Chatham: but a little more
+patient, & will hold my tongue till the end of the year. In the mean
+time I do mutter in secret & to you, that to quit the house of Commons,
+his natural strength; to sap his own popularity & grandeur (which no one
+but himself could have done) by assuming a foolish title; & to hope that
+he could win by it and attach to him a Court, that hate him, & will
+dismiss him, as soon as ever they dare, was the weakest thing, that ever
+was done by so great a Man. Had it not been for this, I should have
+rejoiced at the breach between him & L^d Temple, & at the union between
+him & the D: of Grafton & M^r Conway: but patience! we shall see!
+St:[108] perhaps is in the country (for he hoped for a month's leave of
+absence) and if you see him, you will learn more than I can tell you.
+
+Mason is at Aston. He is no longer so anxious about his wife's health,
+as he was, tho' I find she still has a cough, & moreover I find she is
+not with child: but he made such a bragging, how could one choose but
+believe him.
+
+When I was in town, I mark'd in my pocket-book the utmost limits &
+divisions of the two columns in your Thermometer, and asked Mr. Ayscough
+the Instrument-Maker on Ludgate Hill, what scales they were. He
+immediately assured me, that one was Fahrenheit's, & shew'd me one
+exactly so divided. The other he took for Reaumur's, but, as he said
+there were different scales of his contrivance, he could not exactly
+tell, w^ch of them it was. Your Brother told me, you wanted to know,
+who wrote Duke Wharton's life in the Biography: I think, it is chiefly
+borrowed from a silly book enough call'd _Memoirs of that Duke_: but who
+put it together there, no one can inform me. The only person certainly
+known to write in that vile collection (I mean these latter volumes) is
+D^r Nicholls, who was expell'd here for stealing books.
+
+Have you read the _New Bath-Guide_?[109] it is the only thing in
+fashion, & is a new & original kind of humour. Miss Prue's Conversion I
+doubt you will paste down, as S^r W: S^t Quintyn did, before he carried
+it to his daughter. Yet I remember you all read _Crazy Tales_[110]
+without pasting. Buffon's first collection of Monkeys are come out (it
+makes the 14^th volume) something, but not much, to my edification: for
+he is pretty well acquainted with their persons, but not with their
+manners.
+
+I shall be glad to hear, how far M^rs Ettrick has succeeded, & when you
+see an end to her troubles. my best respects to Mrs. Wharton, &
+compliments to all your family: I will not name them, least I should
+affront any body. Adieu, dear S^r,
+
+I am most sincerely yours,
+
+TG:
+
+August 26, 1766, Pembroke College.
+
+Mr. Brown is gone to see his Brother near Margate. When is L^d Str:[111]
+to be married? If M^r and M^rs Jonathan are with you, I desire my
+compliments.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[108] "St." is Richard Stonhewer, a Fellow of Peterhouse, secretary to
+the Duke of Grafton, and a man of considerable, though not public,
+importance in politics.
+
+[109] Anstey's--referred to in the Introduction.
+
+[110] By Sterne's friend, John Hall Stevenson.
+
+[111] Lord Strathmore.
+
+
+
+
+HORACE WALPOLE (1717-1797)
+
+[AND W. M. THACKERAY].
+
+
+     As much has been already said of Horace Walpole's letters,
+     but practically nothing of his other works except his novel
+     and his play, something more may be added here to show that
+     he was not _merely_ a "trifler." His private press at
+     "Strawberry" was mainly a means of amusement to him, like a
+     billiard-room or a tennis-court. But it provided some useful
+     books--such as editions of Anthony Hamilton's _Memoirs of
+     Grammont_, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's _Life_ and of part
+     of Gray's _Poems_. He had neither historic knowledge nor
+     historic sense enough to deal satisfactorily with such a
+     subject as _Historic Doubts on Richard III._, though the
+     subject itself was quite worth dealing with. But his
+     _Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors_, his _Anecdotes of
+     Painting in England_, and his _Catalogue of Engravers_ are
+     not without value; and he could usefully handle the history
+     of his own time, with proper corrections for his prejudices,
+     etc. He was weakest of all as a literary critic: and his
+     dealings with Chatterton were most unfortunate, though the
+     mischief done was not intentional, and might not have been
+     serious in any other case. These things have been said with
+     a definite purpose--that of showing that Horace's interests,
+     if seldom deep, were unusually wide. Now though width of
+     interest is not, as Cowper's case shows, indispensable to
+     goodness of letter-writing, it is a very great qualification
+     for it, as giving to the result variety, colour, and "bite."
+     At the same time, unless one had space on a very different
+     scale from any possible here, it would be _im_possible to
+     illustrate this "extensive curiosity" as they called it
+     then: and Horace ought to be shown here in his _most_ native
+     element as a chronicler of "society." I have thought it
+     worth while to subjoin for comparison Thackeray's wonderful
+     _pastiche_ in _The Virginians_, which is almost better
+     Horace than Horace himself.[112]
+
+
+22. TO THE COUNTESS OF OSSORY
+
+ARLINGTON STREET,
+April 31. 1773
+
+It is most true, madam, that I did purpose to regale myself with a visit
+to Ampthill; but this winter, which has trod hard upon last week's
+summer, blunted my intention for a while, though revivable in finer
+weather. Oh! but I had another reason for changing my mind; you are
+leaving Ampthill, and I do not mean only to write my name in your
+park-keeper's book. Yes, in spite of your ladyship's low spirited mood,
+you are coming from Ampthill, and you are to be at Strawberry Hill
+to-morrow se'nnight. You may not be in the secret, but Lord Ossory and I
+have settled it, and you are to be pawned to me while he is at
+Newmarket. He told me you certainly would if I asked it, and as they
+used to say in ancient writ, I do beg it upon the knees of my heart.
+Nay, it is unavoidable; for though a lady's word may be ever so
+crackable, you cannot have the conscience to break your husband's word,
+so I depend upon it. I have asked Mr. Craufurd to meet you, but begged
+he would refuse me, that I might be sure of his coming. Mrs Meynel has
+taken another year's lease of her house, so you probably, madam, will
+not be tired of me for the livelong day for the whole time you shall
+honour my mansion. Your face will be well and your fever gone a week
+before to-morrow se'nnight, and you will look as well as ever you did in
+your life, that is, as you have done lately, which is better than ever
+you did before. You must not, in truth, expect that I your shepherd
+should be quite so fit to figure in a fan mount. Besides the gout for
+six months, which makes some flaws in the bloom of elderly Arcadians, I
+have been so far from keeping sheep for the last ten days, that I have
+kept nothing but bad hours; and have been such a rake that I put myself
+in mind of a poor old cripple that I saw formerly at Hogarth's auction:
+he bid for the Rake's Progress, saying, "I will buy my own progress,"
+though he looked as if he had no more title to it than I have, but by
+limping and sitting up. In short, I have been at four balls since
+yesterday se'nnight, though I had the prudence not to stay supper at
+Lord Stanley's. That festival was very expensive, for it is the fashion
+now to make romances rather than balls. In the hall was a band of French
+horns and clarionets in laced uniforms and feathers. The dome of the
+staircase was beautifully illuminated with coloured glass lanthorns; in
+the ante-room was a bevy of vestals in white habits, making tea; in the
+next, a drapery of sarcenet, that with a very funereal air crossed the
+chimney, and depended in vast festoons over the sconces. The third
+chamber's doors were heightened with candles in gilt vases, and the
+ballroom was formed into an oval with benches above each other, not
+unlike pews, and covered with red serge, above which were arbours of
+flowers, red and green pilasters, more sarcenet, and Lord March's
+glasses, which he had lent, as an upholsterer asked Lord Stanley 300l.
+for the loan of some. He had burst open the side of the wall to build an
+orchestra, with a pendant mirror to reflect the dancers, à la Guisnes;
+and the musicians were in scarlet robes, like the candle-snuffers who
+represent the senates of Venice at Drury Lane. There were two more
+chambers at which I never arrived for the crowd. The seasons, danced by
+himself, the younger Storer, the Duc de Lauzun and another, the youngest
+Miss Stanley, Miss Poole, the youngest Wrottesley and another Miss, who
+is likewise anonymous in my memory, were in errant shepherdly dresses
+without invention, and Storer and Miss Wrottesley in banians with furs,
+for winter, cock and hen. In six rooms below were magnificent suppers. I
+was not quite so sober last night at Mons. de Guisnes', where the
+evening began with a ball of children, from eighteen to four years old.
+They danced amazingly well, yet disappointed me, so many of them were
+ugly; but Dr. Delawarr's two eldest daughters and the Ancaster infanta
+performed a pas de trois as well as Mlle. Heinel, and the two eldest
+were pretty; yet I promise you, madam, the next age will be a thousand
+degrees below the present in beauty. The most interesting part was to
+observe the anxiety of the mothers while their children danced or
+supped; they supped at ten in three rooms. I should not omit telling you
+that the Vernons, especially the eldest, were not the homeliest part of
+the show. The former quadrilles then came again upon the stage, and
+Harry Conway the younger was so astonished at the agility of Mrs.
+Hobart's bulk, that he said he was sure she must be hollow. The tables
+were again spread in five rooms, and at past two in the morning we went
+to supper. To excuse _we_, I must plead that both the late and present
+chancellor, and the solemn Lord Lyttleton, my predecessors by some
+years, stayed as late as I did--and in good sooth the watchman went four
+as my chairman knocked at my door.
+
+Such is the result of good resolutions! I determined during my illness
+to have my colt's tooth drawn, and lo! I have cut four new in a week.
+Well! at least I am as grave as a judge, looked as rosy as Lord
+Lyttleton, and much soberer than my Lord Chancellor. To shew some marks
+of grace, I shall give up the opera, (indeed it is very bad) and go and
+retake my doctor's degrees among the dowagers at Lady Blandford's; and
+intending to have no more diversions than I have news to tell your
+ladyship, I think you shall not hear from me again till we meet, as I
+shall think it, in heaven.
+
+
+23. (_Thackeray imitating_). TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, Friday night.
+
+I have come away, child, for a day or two from my devotions to our Lady
+of Strawberry. Have I not been on my knees to her these three weeks, and
+aren't the poor old joints full of rheumatism? A fit took me that I
+would pay London a visit, that I would go to Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
+_Quoi!_ May I not have my rattle as well as other elderly babies?
+Suppose, after being so long virtuous, I take a fancy to cakes and ale,
+shall your reverence say nay to me? George Selwyn and Tony Storer and
+your humble servant took boat at Westminster t'other night. Was it
+Tuesday?--no, Tuesday I was with their Graces of Norfolk, who are just
+from Tunbridge--it was Wednesday. How should I know?
+
+Wasn't I dead drunk with a whole pint of lemonade I took at White's?
+
+The Norfolk folk had been entertaining me on Tuesday with the account of
+a young savage Iroquois, Choctaw, or Virginian, who has lately been
+making a little noise in our quarter of the globe. He is an offshoot of
+that disreputable family of Esmond-Castlewood, of whom all the men are
+gamblers and spendthrifts, and all the women--well, I shan't say the
+word, lest Lady Ailesbury should be looking over your shoulder. Both the
+late lords, my father told me, were in his pay, and the last one, a beau
+of Queen Anne's reign, from a viscount advanced to be an earl through
+the merits and intercession of his notorious old sister Bernstein, late
+Tusher, _nee_ Esmond--a great beauty, too, of her day, a favourite of
+the old Pretender. She sold his secrets to my papa, who paid her for
+them; and being nowise particular in her love for the Stuarts, came over
+to the august Hanoverian house at present reigning over us. "Will Horace
+Walpole's tongue never stop scandal?" says your wife over your shoulder.
+I kiss your ladyship's hand. I am dumb. The Bernstein is a model of
+virtue. She had no good reasons for marrying her father's chaplain. Many
+of the nobility omit the marriage altogether. She _wasn't_ ashamed of
+being Mrs. Tusher, and didn't take a German _Baroncino_ for a second
+husband, whom nobody out of Hanover ever saw. The Yarmouth bears no
+malice. Esther and Vashti are very good friends, and have been cheating
+each other at Tunbridge at cards all the summer.
+
+"And what has all this to do with the Iroquois?" says your ladyship. The
+Iroquois has been at Tunbridge, too--not cheating, perhaps, but winning
+vastly. They say he has bled Lord March of thousands--Lord March, by
+whom so much blood hath been shed, that he has quarrelled with
+everybody, fought with everybody, rode over everybody, been fallen in
+love with by everybody's wife except Mr. Conway's, and _not_ excepting
+her present Majesty, the Countess of England, Scotland, France and
+Ireland, Queen of Walmoden and Yarmouth, whom heaven preserve to us.
+
+You know an offensive little creature _de par le monde_, one Jack
+Morris, who skips in and out of all the houses of London. When we were
+at Vauxhall, Mr. Jack gave us a nod under the shoulder of a pretty young
+fellow enough, on whose arm he was leaning, and who appeared hugely
+delighted with the enchantments of the garden. Lord, how he stared at
+the fireworks! Gods, how he huzzayed at the singing of a horrible
+painted wench who shrieked the ears off my head! A twopenny string of
+glass beads and a strip of tawdry cloth are treasures in Iroquois-land,
+and our savage valued them accordingly.
+
+A buzz went about the place that this was the fortunate youth. He won
+three hundred at White's last night very genteelly from Rockingham and
+my precious nephew, and here he was bellowing and huzzaying over the
+music so as to do you good to hear. I do not love a puppet-show, but I
+love to treat children to one, Miss Conway! I present your ladyship my
+compliments, and hope we shall go and see the dolls together.
+
+When the singing-woman came down from her throne, Jack Morris must
+introduce my Virginian to her. I saw him blush up to the eyes, and make
+her, upon my word, a very fine bow, such as I had no idea was practised
+in wigwams. "There is a certain _jenny squaw_ about her, and that's why
+the savage likes her," George said--a joke certainly not as brilliant as
+a firework. After which it seemed to me that the savage and the savagess
+retired together.
+
+Having had a great deal too much to eat and drink three hours before, my
+partners must have chicken and rack-punch at Vauxhall, where George fell
+asleep straightway, and for my sins I must tell Tony Storer what I knew
+about this Virginian's amiable family, especially some of the
+Bernstein's antecedents and the history of another elderly beauty of the
+family, a certain Lady Maria, who was _au mieux_ with the late Prince of
+Wales. What did I say? I protest not half of what I knew, and of course
+not a tenth part of what I was going to tell, for who should start out
+upon us but my savage, this time quite red in the face; and in his _war
+paint_. The wretch had been drinking fire-water in the next box!
+
+He cocked his hat, clapped his hand to his sword, asked which of the
+gentlemen was it that was maligning his family? so that I was obliged to
+entreat him not to make such a noise, lest he should wake my friend Mr.
+George Selwyn. And I added, "I assure you, sir, I had no idea that you
+were near me, and I most sincerely apologize for giving you pain."
+
+The Huron took his hand off his tomahawk at this pacific rejoinder, made
+a bow not ungraciously, said he could not, of course, ask more than an
+apology from a gentleman of my age (_Merci, Monsieur!_) and, hearing the
+name of Mr. Selwyn, made another bow to George, and said he had a letter
+to him from Lord March, which he had had the ill-fortune to mislay.
+George has put him up for the club, it appears, in conjunction with
+March, and no doubt these three lambs will fleece each other. Meanwhile,
+my pacified savage sat down with us, and _buried the hatchet_ in another
+bowl of punch, for which these gentlemen must call. Heaven help us! 'Tis
+eleven o'clock, and here comes Bedson with my gruel!
+
+H. W.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[112] There is an amicable dispute among Thackerayans whether this or
+the imitation-_Spectator_ paper in _Esmond_ is the more wonderful of
+their joint kind. To facilitate this comparison the letter part (for
+there is one) of that paper will be given here under Thackeray's own
+name.
+
+
+
+
+TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT (1721-1771)
+
+
+     Smollett's reputation has been of course always mainly,
+     indeed almost wholly, that of a novelist, though his
+     miscellaneous work is of no small merit. But that he wrote
+     his best novel _in_ letters and that perhaps it is one of
+     the best so written, has been mentioned. His _Travels_ are
+     also of the letter-kind--especially of the
+     ill-tempered-letter-kind. Of his actual correspondence we
+     have not much. But the following has always seemed to the
+     present writer an admirable and agreeably characteristic
+     example. Smollett's outwardly surly but inwardly kindly
+     temper, and his command of phrase ("great Cham of
+     literature" has, as we say now, "stuck") both appear in it:
+     and the matter is interesting. We have, so far as I
+     remember, no record of any interview between Johnson and
+     Smollett, though they must have met. They were both Tories,
+     and Johnson wrote in the _Critical Review_ which Smollett
+     edited. But Johnson's gibes at Scotland are not likely to
+     have conciliated Smollett: and there was just that
+     combination of likeness and difference between the two men
+     which (especially as the one was as typically English as the
+     other was Scotch) generates incompatibility. How
+     victoriously Wilkes got over Johnson's personal dislike to
+     him all readers of Boswell know: and it is one of the most
+     amusing passages in the book. On this occasion, too, he did
+     what was asked of him. "Frank" had not been _pressed_, but
+     had joined for some reason of his own. However, he accepted
+     his discharge and returned to his master, staying till that
+     master's death.
+
+
+24. TO JOHN WILKES, ESQ.
+
+CHELSEA, 16th March, 1759.
+
+Dear Sir
+
+I am again your petitioner, in behalf of that great CHAM of literature,
+Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has
+been pressed on board the Stag frigate, Captain Angel, and our
+lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad, of
+a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in his throat,
+which renders him very unfit for His Majesty's service. You know what
+matter of animosity the said Johnson has against you: and I dare say you
+desire no other opportunity of resenting it, than that of laying him
+under an obligation. He was humble enough to desire my assistance on
+this occasion, though he and I were never cater-cousins; and I gave him
+to understand that I would make application to my friend Mr. Wilkes,
+who, perhaps, by his interest with Dr. Hay and Mr. Elliot, might be able
+to procure the discharge of his lacquey. It would be superfluous to say
+more on this subject, which I leave to your own consideration; but I
+cannot let slip this opportunity of declaring that I am, with the most
+inviolable esteem and attachment, dear Sir, your affectionate, obliged,
+humble servant,
+
+T. SMOLLETT.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800)
+
+
+     It was necessary to say a good deal about Cowper's letters
+     in the Introduction, but it would hardly do to stint him of
+     some further comment. It will be a most unfortunate evidence
+     of degradation in English literary taste if he ever loses
+     the position there assigned to him, and practically
+     acknowledged by all the best judges for the last century.
+     For there is certainly no other epistoler who has displayed
+     such consummate (if also such unconscious) art in making the
+     most out of the least. Of course people who must have noise,
+     and bustle, and "importance" of matter, and so forth, may be
+     dissatisfied. But their dissatisfaction convicts not Cowper
+     but themselves: and the conviction is not for want of Art,
+     but for want of appreciation of Art. Now this last is one of
+     the most terrible faults to be found in any human creature.
+     Not everybody can be an artist: but everybody who is not
+     deficient to this or that extent in sense--to use that word
+     in its widest and best interpretation, for understanding and
+     feeling both--can enjoy an artist's work. Nor is there any
+     more important function of the often misused word
+     "education" than "bringing out" this sense when it is
+     dormant, and training and developing it when it is brought
+     out. And few things are more useful for exercise in this way
+     than the under-current of artistry in Cowper's "chit-chat."
+     His letters are so familiar that it is vain to aim at any
+     great originality in selecting them. The following strikes
+     me as an excellent example. What more trite than references
+     to increased expense of postage (rather notably topical just
+     now though!) and remarks on a greenhouse? And what less
+     trite--except to tritical tastes and intellects--than this
+     letter?
+
+
+25. TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON
+
+Sept. 18. 1784.
+
+My dear Friend,
+
+Following your good example, I lay before me a sheet of my largest
+paper. It was this moment fair and unblemished but I have begun to blot
+it, and having begun, am not likely to cease till I have spoiled it. I
+have sent you many a sheet that in my judgment of it has been very
+unworthy of your acceptance, but my conscience was in some measure
+satisfied by reflecting, that if it were good for nothing, at the same
+time it cost you nothing, except the trouble of reading it. But the case
+is altered now. You must pay a solid price for frothy matter, and though
+I do not absolutely pick your pocket, yet you lose your money, and, as
+the saying is, are never the wiser; a saying literally fulfilled to the
+reader of my epistles.
+
+My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of
+being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the
+calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat
+than we ever find it in summer; when, the winds being generally brisk,
+we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without
+being at the same time incommoded by it. But now I sit with all the
+windows and the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every
+flower in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We
+keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I should hardly hear more of
+their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of
+mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get
+out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to
+my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters
+are delightful,--at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the
+roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I
+know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical, save and
+except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and
+fowls please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of
+keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for
+the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is
+no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black beetle, and beetles
+indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I have no objection to any
+of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's
+fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all. Seriously
+however it strikes me as a very observable instance of providential
+kindness to man, that such an exact accord has been contrived between
+his ear, and the sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is
+almost every moment visited. All the world is sensible of the
+uncomfortable effect that certain sounds have upon the nerves, and
+consequently upon the spirits:--and if a sinful world had been filled
+with such as would have curdled the blood, and have made the sense of
+hearing a perpetual inconvenience, I do not know that we should have had
+a right to complain. But now the fields, the woods, the gardens have
+each their concert, and the ear of man is for ever regaled by creatures
+who seem only to please themselves. Even the ears that are deaf to the
+Gospel, are continually entertained, though without knowing it, by
+sounds for which they are solely indebted to its author. There is
+somewhere in infinite space a world that does not roll within the
+precincts of mercy, and as it is reasonable, and even scriptural, to
+suppose that there is music in Heaven, in those dismal regions perhaps
+the reverse of it is found; tones so dismal, as to make woe itself more
+insupportable, and to acuminate[113] even despair. But my paper
+admonishes me in good time to draw the reins, and to check the descent
+of my fancy into deeps, with which she is but too familiar.
+
+Our best love attends you both, with yours,
+
+_Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus_,
+
+W. C.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[113] "Acuminate" = "sharpen," is a perfectly good word in itself, but
+perhaps does not so perfectly suit "despair," which crushes rather than
+pierces.
+
+
+
+
+SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845)
+
+
+     It has been said of Sydney Smith that he was not only a
+     humourist, but a "good-humourist," and this is undoubtedly
+     true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual custom,
+     sometimes rather acidulated his good humour; but anybody
+     possessed of the noun, with the least allowance of the
+     adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which the
+     almost Radical reformer of _Peter Plymley's Letters_ in 1807
+     became the almost Tory and wholly conservative maintainer of
+     ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon Singleton
+     thirty years later.
+
+     Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated kind: but
+     we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence, also
+     agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing. Whether Sydney
+     (his friends always abbreviated him thus, and he accepted
+     the Christian name) describes the makeshifts of his
+     Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset one;
+     whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums on
+     pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given him a
+     whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time"--he is
+     always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do not go
+     to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive
+     sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves
+     as does that of some--perhaps most--professional jokers:
+     neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it
+     bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for
+     they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in
+     still shorter _flashes_ such as those glanced at above; as
+     the grave proposition that "the information of very plain
+     women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting
+     no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short
+     newspaper paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard work
+     with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous this
+     season and in great force, from the irregular supply of
+     rain." But the following specimens are fairly
+     representative. They were written at an interval of about
+     ten years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe
+     Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who
+     began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming
+     Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady Rachel," the
+     famous wife of the person who suffered for the Rye House
+     plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady Russell, but
+     Miss Berry had written a _Life_ of her under her maiden
+     name). Sydney's politics show in his allusion to the
+     assassination of the Duc de Berri, son of Charles X. of
+     France (who had, however, not then come to the throne); in
+     his infinitely greater sorrow for the dismissal of the
+     mildly Liberal minister Decazes; and in his spleen at the
+     supporters of the English Tory government of Lord Liverpool.
+     (The "little plot" was Thistlewood's). In the second letter
+     the "hotel" is his new parsonage in Somerset: "Bowood," Lord
+     Lansdowne's Wiltshire house, a great Whig rallying place. I
+     suppose "Sea-shore Calcott" is Sir A. W. Calcott the
+     painter. "Luttrell" (Henry), a talker and versifier very
+     well known in his own day, but of less enduring reputation
+     than some others. "Napier's Book," the brilliant if somewhat
+     partisan _History of the Peninsular War_. I am not quite
+     certain in which of two senses Sydney uses the word
+     _caractère_. As ought to be well known this does not exactly
+     correspond to our "character"--but most commonly means
+     "temper" or "disposition." It has, however, a peculiar
+     technical meaning of "official description" or "estimate"
+     which would suit Sir William Napier well. The Napiers were
+     "kittle cattle" from the official point of view.
+
+
+26. TO MISS BERRY
+
+FOSTON, Feb 27th, 1820.
+
+I thank you very much for the entertainment I have received from your
+book. I should however have been afraid to marry such a woman as Lady
+Rachel; it would have been too awful. There are pieces of china very
+fine and beautiful, but never intended for daily use....
+
+I have hardly slept out of Foston since I saw you. God send I may be
+still an animal, and not a vegetable! but I am a little uneasy at this
+season for sprouting and rural increase, for I fear I should have
+undergone the metamorphose so common in country livings. I shall go to
+town about the end of March; it will be completely empty, and the drugs
+that remain will be entirely occupied about hustings and
+returning-officers.
+
+Commerce and manufacturers are still in a frightful state of stagnation.
+
+    No foreign barks in British ports are seen,
+    Stuff'd to the water's edge with velveteen,
+    Or bursting with big bales of bombazine;
+    No distant climes demand our corduroy,
+    Unmatch'd habiliment for man and boy;
+    No fleets of fustian quit the British shore,
+    The cloth-creating engines cease to roar,
+    Still is that loom which breech'd the world before.
+
+I am very sorry for the little fat Duke de Berri, but infinitely more so
+for the dismissal of De Cases,--a fatal measure.
+
+I must not die without seeing Paris. Figure to yourself what a horrid
+death,--to die without seeing Paris! I think I could make something of
+this in a tragedy, so as to draw tears from Donna Agnes and yourself.
+Where are you going to? When do you return? Why do you go at all? Is
+Paris more agreeable than London?
+
+We have had a little plot here in a hay-loft. God forbid anybody should
+be murdered! but, if I were to turn assassin, it should not be of five
+or six Ministers, who are placed where they are by the folly of the
+country gentlemen, but of the hundred thousand squires, to whose
+stupidity and folly such an Administration owes its existence.
+
+Ever your friend,
+
+SYDNEY SMITH.
+
+
+27. TO N. FAZAKERLY, ESQ.
+
+COMBE FLOREY, October, 1829.
+
+Dear Fazakerly,
+
+I don't know anybody who would be less affronted at being called
+hare-brained than our friend who has so tardily conveyed my message, and
+I am afraid now he has only given you a part of it. The omission appears
+to be, that I had set up an hotel on the Western road, that it would be
+opened next spring, and I hoped for the favour of yours and Mrs.
+Fazakerly's patronage. "Well-aired beds, neat wines, careful drivers,
+etc. etc."
+
+I shall have very great pleasure in coming to see you, and I quite agree
+in the wisdom of postponing that event till the rural Palladios and
+Vitruvii are chased away; I have fourteen of them here every day. The
+country is perfectly beautiful, and my parsonage the prettiest place in
+it.
+
+I was at Bowood last week: the only persons there were seashore Calcott
+and his wife,--two very sensible, agreeable people. Luttrell came over
+for the day; he was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of
+veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in
+vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on
+dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic
+objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into
+better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of
+what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same kind he
+has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually and
+justly elevated the species. I am perhaps making too much of this; but
+the failures of a man of sense are always painful.
+
+I quite agree about Napier's book. I do[114] not think that any[114] man
+would venture to write so true, bold, and honest a book; it gave me a
+high idea of his understanding, and makes me very anxious about his
+_caractère_
+
+Ever yours,
+
+SYDNEY SMITH.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[114] One would expect either "did" or "other": but the actual
+combination is a very likely slip of pen or press.
+
+
+
+
+SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
+
+
+     Since this little book was undertaken it has been announced,
+     truly or not, that the bulk of Scott's autograph letters has
+     been bought by a fortunate and wise man of letters for the
+     sum of £1500. Neither life nor literature can ever be
+     expressed in money value: but if one had £1500 to spend on
+     something not directly necessary, it is possible to imagine
+     a very large number of less satisfactory purchases. For as
+     was briefly suggested in the Introduction, Scott's
+     letters--while saturated with that singular humanity and
+     nobility of character in which he has hardly a rival among
+     authors of whom we know much--are distinctly remarkable from
+     the purely literary point of view. His published work, both
+     in verse and prose, has been accused (with what amount of
+     justice we will not here trouble ourselves to discuss)--of
+     carelessness in style and art. No such charge could possibly
+     be brought against his letters, which hit the happy mean
+     between slovenliness and artificial elaboration in a fashion
+     that could hardly be bettered. The great variety of his
+     correspondents, too, provides an additional attraction: for
+     letters indited to the same person are apt to show a certain
+     monotony. And Scott is equal to any and every occasion. Here
+     as elsewhere the "Diary" drains off a certain proportion of
+     matter: but chiefly for the latest period and in
+     circumstances scarcely happy enough for letters themselves.
+
+     The following letter was selected because of its admirable
+     treatment of a theme--the behaviour, responsibility, and
+     general _status_ of Authors as objects of public
+     judgment--on which an infinite amount of deplorable and
+     disgusting nonsense has been talked and written. It starts,
+     as will be seen, with the quarrel between Lord and Lady
+     Byron--and then generalises. Not many things show Scott's
+     golden equity and fairness better. He is perhaps "a little
+     kind" to Campbell, who was, one fears, an extra-irritable
+     specimen of the irritable race: but this is venial. And
+     probably he did not mean the stigma which might be inferred
+     from the conjunction of "Aphra _and_ Orinda." They were
+     certainly both of Charles II.'s time: but while poor Aphra
+     was, if not wholly vicious, far from virtuous, the
+     "matchless Orinda" (Katherine Philips) bears no stain on her
+     character.
+
+
+28. TO JOANNA BAILLIE
+
+(End of April 1816)
+
+My dear friend,
+
+I am glad you are satisfied with my reasons for declining a direct
+interference with Lord B[yron]. I have not, however, been quite idle,
+and as an old seaman have tried to go by a side wind when I had not the
+means of going before it, and this will be so far plain to you when I
+say that I have every reason to believe the good intelligence is true
+that a separation is signed between Lord and Lady Byron. If I am not as
+angry as you have good reason to expect every thinking and feeling man
+to be, it is from deep sorrow and regret that a man possessed of such
+noble talents should so utterly and irretrievably lose himself. In
+short, I believe the thing to be as you state it, and therefore Lord
+Byron is the object of anything rather than indignation. It is a cruel
+pity that such high talents should have been joined to a mind so wayward
+and incapable of seeking control where alone it is to be found, in the
+quiet discharge of domestic duties and filling up in peace and affection
+his station in society. The idea of his ultimately resisting that which
+should be fair and honourable to Lady B. did not come within my view of
+his character--at least of his natural character; but I hear that, as
+you intimated, he has had execrable advisers. I hardly know a more
+painful object of consideration than a man of genius in such a
+situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation, and become
+like pigs, familiarised with the filthy elements in which they grovel;
+but it is impossible that a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often
+feel the want of that which he has forfeited--the fair esteem of those
+by whom genius most naturally desires to be admired and cherished.
+
+I am much obliged to Mrs. Baillie for excluding me in her general
+censure of authors; but I should have hoped for a more general spirit of
+toleration from my good friend, who had in her own family and under her
+own eye such an exception to her general censure--unless, indeed (which
+may not be far from the truth), she supposes that female genius is more
+gentle and tractable, though as high in tone and spirit as that of the
+masculine sex. But the truth is, I believe, we will find a great
+equality when the different habits of the sexes and the temptations they
+are exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early flattered and
+coaxed, and told they are fitted for the higher regions of genius and
+unfit for anything else,--that they are a superior kind of automaton and
+ought to move by different impulses than others,--indulge their friends
+and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that worthy
+knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And then, if our man of genius
+escapes this temptation, how is he to parry the opposition of the
+blockheads who join all their hard heads and horns together to butt him
+out of the ordinary pasture, goad him back to Parnassus, and "bid him
+on the barren mountain starve." It is amazing how far this goes, if a
+man will let it go, in turning him out of the ordinary course of life
+into the stream of odd bodies, so that authors come to be regarded as
+tumblers, who are expected to go to church in a summerset, because they
+sometimes throw a Catherine-wheel for the amusement of the public. A man
+even told me at an election, thinking I believe he was saying a severe
+thing, that I was a poet, and therefore that the subject we were
+discussing lay out of my way. I answered as quietly as I could, that I
+did not apprehend my having written poetry rendered me incapable of
+speaking common sense in prose, and that I requested the audience to
+judge of me not by the nonsense I might have written for their
+amusement, but by the sober sense I was endeavouring to speak for their
+information, and only expected [of] them, in case I had ever happened to
+give any of them pleasure, in a way which was supposed to require some
+information and talent, [that] they would not, for that sole reason,
+suppose me incapable of understanding or explaining a point of the
+profession for which I had been educated. So I got a patient and very
+favourable hearing. But certainly these great exertions of friends and
+enemies have forced many a poor fellow out of the common paths of life,
+and obliged him to make a trade of what can only be gracefully executed
+as an occasional avocation. When such a man is encouraged in all his
+freaks and follies, the bit is taken out of his mouth, and, as he is
+turned out upon the common, he is very apt to deem himself exempt from
+all the rules incumbent on those who keep the king's highway. And so
+they play fantastic tricks before high heaven.
+
+The lady authors are not exempt from these vagaries, being exposed to
+the same temptations; and all I can allow Mrs. Baillie in favour of the
+fair sex is that since the time of the Aphras and Orindas of Charles
+II's time, the authoresses have been ridiculous only, while the authors
+have too often been both absurd and vicious. As to our leal friend Tom
+Campbell, I have heard stories of his morbid sensibility chiefly from
+the Minto family, with whom he lived for some time, and I think they all
+turned on little foolish points of capricious affectation, which perhaps
+had no better foundation than an ill-imagined mode of exhibiting his
+independence. But whatever I saw of him myself--and we were often
+together, and sometimes for several days--was quite composed and manly.
+Indeed, I never worried him to make him get on his hind legs and spout
+poetry when he did not like it. He deserves independence well; and if
+the dog which now awakens him to the recollection of his possessing it,
+happened formerly to disturb the short sleep that drowned his
+recollection of so great a blessing, there is good reason for enduring
+the disturbance with more patience than before.
+
+But surely, admitting all our temptations and irregularities there are
+men of genius enough living to restrain the mere possession of talent
+from the charge of disqualifying the owner for the ordinary occupation
+and duties of life. There never were better men, and especially better
+husbands, fathers, and real patriots, than Southey and Wordsworth; they
+might even be pitched upon as most exemplary characters. I myself, if I
+may rank myself in the list, am, as Hamlet says, indifferent honest, and
+at least not worse than an infidel in loving those of my own house. And
+I think that generally speaking, authors, like actors, being rather
+less commonly believed to be eccentric than was the faith fifty years
+since, do conduct themselves as amenable to the ordinary rules of
+society.
+
+This tirade was begun a long time since, but is destined to be finished
+at Abbotsford. Your bower is all planted with its evergreens, but must
+for seven years retain its original aspect of a gravel pit.
+
+(Rest lost.)
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
+
+
+     It is a strange thing, and could hardly have happened in any
+     country but England, that there is to this day no complete
+     collection or edition of the works of Coleridge--one of the
+     most poetical of our poets, one of the most important of our
+     critics, and one of the most influential, if one of the
+     least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers. Indeed
+     we never knew what good prose he could write till the
+     fragments called _Anima Poetae_ were published, two-thirds
+     of a century after his death. But that no collected edition
+     of his letters appeared till very shortly before this is
+     explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's temperament
+     was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his
+     conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage,
+     the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he
+     must have been "a very _beatable_ child." To a certain
+     extent, however, the correspondence does also justify our
+     adoption (see _Introduction_) of the charitable theory that
+     enlargement of understanding brings about extension of
+     pardon. And putting this aside, the letters sometimes give
+     us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous conversation
+     (or rather monologue) must have been like. They are not very
+     easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to
+     _divagation_ affects them. But they sometimes display that
+     humour which he undoubtedly possessed, though his best-known
+     published writings seldom admit of it: and the divagation
+     itself has its advantages. In the following Coleridge
+     appears in curiously different lights. After joking at his
+     own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it _was_,
+     as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to
+     cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often
+     made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise
+     to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a
+     favourite quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the _Morning
+     Post_ for which Coleridge was then writing. "The
+     Anthology"--an _Annual_ one edited by Southey. As for the
+     _Anti-Jacobin_ libel it was, admirable as was the wit that
+     accompanied it, utterly indefensible; for it accused
+     Coleridge of having _at this time_ "left his poor children
+     fatherless and his wife destitute" (the extraordinary thing
+     is that he actually did this later!) Of course he never
+     executed the Life of Lessing.[115] "The Wedgwoods" had given
+     him an annuity. The assault on "Mr. Go_b_win" is one of poor
+     Hartley Coleridge's most delightful feats. Had he been a
+     little older, he might have pointed out to the author of
+     _Political Justice_ that lecturing his mother for his,
+     Hartley's, fault was quite unjustifiable: and indeed that
+     objecting to it at all was improper. The right way
+     (according to that great work itself) would have been to
+     discuss with Hartley whether the advantage in physical
+     exercise and animal spirits derived by him from wielding the
+     nine-pin, outweighed the pain experienced by Go_b_win, and
+     so was justifiable on the total scheme of things. ("Moshes,"
+     as indeed is obvious, was Hartley's pet-name).
+
+
+29. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
+
+Tuesday night, 12 o'clock
+(December 24) 1799.
+
+My dear Southey,
+
+My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)
+disposed me to consider this big city as that part of the supreme One
+which the prophet Moses was allowed to see--I should be more disposed
+to pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a _Bush_, than while I am forcing
+my reason to believe that even in theatres _He_ is, yea! even in the
+Opera House. Your "Thalaba" will beyond all doubt bring you two hundred
+pounds, if you will sell it at once; but _do_ not print at a venture,
+under the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that Longman
+regretted the bargain he made with Cottle concerning the second edition
+of the "Joan of Arc," and is indisposed to similar negotiations; but
+most and very eager to have the property of your works at almost any
+price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you may hear it from
+me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle's affairs in London. The whole
+and total copyright of your "Joan," and the first volume of your poems
+(exclusive of what Longman had before given), was taken by him at three
+hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong swimmer, and have borne up
+poor Joey with all his leaden weights about him, his own and other
+people's! Nothing has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost
+somewhat--by Fox, Amos, and himself _very much_. I can sell your
+"Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am
+employed from I-rise to I-set (that is, from nine in the morning to
+twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers'
+compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays _all_ my expenses here,
+let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an
+hundred and fifty pounds for my year's expenditure; for, supposing _all
+clear_, my year's (1800) allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by
+the first of April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write
+often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay on the new
+French Constitution, Advice to Friends of Freedom, Critiques on Sir W.
+Anderson's Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted),
+Christmas Carols, etc., etc.--anything not bad in the paper, that is not
+yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the
+"Anthology," "do me the honour, sir!" However, in the course of a week I
+_do mean_ to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of
+public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of
+London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as
+strict a sense as is _possible_, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had
+planned, that "Ode to the Duchess" would have been a better thing than
+it is--it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the "Beauties of
+the Anti-jacobin," and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute,
+and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or
+expense. They say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about
+the "Fears in Solitude." If he gives them up they are yours. That dull
+ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to "sink with
+deep swoop, and to the bottom _go_," to quote an admired author; but the
+two others will do with a little trimming.
+
+My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most
+oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the "Life of
+Lessing"; till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof
+that I am _endeavouring_ to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot
+stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility
+of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the
+South of France. Peace will come soon. God love you, my dear Southey!
+_I_ would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should
+do nothing that did not absolutely _please_ you. Be idle, be very idle!
+The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but
+be as idle as you can.
+
+Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received
+our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without
+diminution on my side. 'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the
+blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's and met
+Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young
+Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine
+at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such
+a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain _lectured_
+Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. _Est modus in rebus._
+Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of
+Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary
+Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.
+
+God love you and
+
+S. T. COLERIDGE.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[115] I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the
+books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most
+interesting library in Utopia.
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)
+
+
+     One of the strangest things met by the present writer in the
+     course of preparing this book was a remark of the late Mr.
+     Scoones--an old acquaintance and a man who has deserved most
+     excellently on the subject--in reference to Southey's
+     letters, that they show the author as "dry and
+     unsympathetic." "They contain too much information to be
+     good as letters." Well: there certainly is information in
+     the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not
+     readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite
+     occasional touches of self-righteousness and of
+     over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily
+     affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a
+     great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge:
+     for "lingos" of the kind, though in her case they may have
+     helped to disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were
+     in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon,
+     especially--physiologists must say why--with the female sex.
+     The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth
+     century, knew a lady of family, position and property who
+     was fond of the phrase, "hail-fellow-well-met," but always
+     turned it into "Fellowship Wilmot"--a pretty close parallel
+     to "horsemangander" for "horse-godmother". Extension--with
+     levelling--of education, and such processes as those which
+     have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and "Kirton" into
+     "Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon rarer: but have
+     also made such a _locus classicus_ of the habit as this all
+     the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in
+     one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this
+     peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the
+     aptitude of the younger in her "_mother_-tongue." Southey
+     has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend
+     Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but
+     the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr.
+     Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of
+     Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of
+     Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature,
+     sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara
+     Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth--the three
+     daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father
+     says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was
+     little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with
+     surprise of some German lady as "smaller than you are").
+
+
+30. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Sep. 14, 1821
+
+Dear Stumparumper,
+
+Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The
+purport of this letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes
+in Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of
+the language spoken in this house by ... and invented by her. I have
+carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and
+mine, having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in
+full confabulumpatus.
+
+
+31. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Oct. 7, 1821.
+
+My dear G,
+
+I very much approve your laudable curiosity to know the precise meaning
+of that noble word _horsemangandering_. Before I tell you its
+application, you must be informed of its history and origin. Be it
+therefore known unto you that ... the whole and sole inventor of the
+never-to-be-forgotten _lingo grande_ (in which, by the bye, I purpose
+ere long to compose a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my
+daughter a great _horsemangander_, thinking, I suppose, that that
+appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning as could be put into
+any decent compound. From this substantive the verb has been formed to
+denote an operation performed by the said daughter upon the said aunt,
+of which I was an astonished spectator. The horsemangander--that is to
+say, Edith May--being tall and strong, came behind the person to be
+horsemangandered (to wit, ...), and took her round the waist, under the
+arms, then jumped with her all the way from the kitchen into the middle
+of the parlour; the motion of the horsemangandered person at every jump
+being something like that of a paviour's rammer, and all resistance
+impossible.
+
+
+32. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Oct. 8, 1821.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+P.S. The name of the newly-discovered language (of which I have more to
+say hereafter) is the _lingo grande_.
+
+
+33. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Dec. 24, 1822
+
+Dear Stumparumper,
+
+So long a time has elapsed since I sent you the commencement of my
+remarks upon the peculiar language spoken by ... which I have
+denominated the LINGO-GRANDE, that I fear you may suppose that I have
+altogether neglected the subject. Yet such a subject, as you must
+perceive, requires a great deal of patient observation, as well as of
+attentive consideration; and were I to flustercumhurry over it, as if it
+were a matter which could be undercumstood in a jiffump (that is to say
+in a momper), this would be to do what I have undertaken shabroonily,
+and you might shartainly have reason to think me fuffling and
+indiscruckt. Upon my vurtz I have not dumdawdled with it, like a
+dangleampeter; which being interpreted in the same _lingo_ is an
+undecider, or an improvidentur, too idle to explore the hurtch mine
+which he has had the fortune to discover. No, I must be a stupossum
+indeed to act thus, as well as a slouwdowdekcum, or slowdonothinger; and
+these are appellations which she has never bestowed upon me; though,
+perhaps, the uncommon richness, and even exuberance of her language has
+not been more strikingly displayed in anything than in the variety of
+names which it has enabled her to shower upon my devoted person.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so-o-o,
+    Dear Miscumter Bedfordiddlededford,
+        I subcumscribe myself,
+  Your sincumcere friendiddledend and serdiddledeservant,
+    ROBCUMBERT SOUTHEY DIDDIEDOUTHEY.
+
+Student in the Lingo-Grande, Graduate in Butlerology, Professor of the
+science of Noncumsensediddledense, of sneezing and of vocal music, P.L.
+and LL.D. etc etc.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[116] See Wordsworth's _Triad_.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)
+
+
+     There are not many people about whom it is more
+     difficult--or more unnecessary--to write than it is about
+     Lamb. A few very unfortunate people do not enjoy him, and
+     probably never could be made to do so. Most of those who
+     care for literature at all revel in him: and do not in the
+     least need to be told to do so. And, as was said before,
+     there is hardly any difference between his published works
+     and his letters except that the former stand a little--a
+     very little--more "upon ceremony." As to selecting the
+     letters one remembers Mr. Matthew Arnold's very agreeable
+     confession, when he was asked to select his poems, that he
+     wanted to select them all. This being impossible, one has to
+     confess that, putting subject, scale etc. aside, any one is
+     almost as tempting as any other, and that whatever is chosen
+     reminds one, half-regretfully, of the letters that were
+     left. When a man can write (to William Wordsworth too), "The
+     very head and sum of the girlery were two young girls,"
+     there is nothing left to do but to repeat, with the slight
+     alteration of "write to" for "ask," Thackeray's ejaculation
+     to the supposed host at an unusually satisfactory dinner,
+     "Dear Sir! do _ask_ us again." And on almost every page of
+     his letters, whether in Talfourd's original issue of them or
+     in the more recent and fuller editions of his works, the
+     spirit is the same everywhere: the volume only differs. If
+     (but you never know exactly when Lamb is speaking seriously)
+     at the time he had "an aversion from letter writing," then
+     most certainly Mrs. Malaprop was justified in saying that
+     there "is nothing like beginning with a little aversion"!
+     The letter which follows is, though it may have pleased
+     others besides myself, not one of the stock examples. But
+     it seems to me to present a rather unusual combination of
+     Lamb's attractive qualities, not a little of his rare phrase
+     ("divine plain face" especially) and a remarkable expression
+     of that yearning for _solitude_ which some people seem to
+     think rather shameful, but which to others is a thing no
+     more to be accounted for than it is to be got rid of. It
+     will be observed that the letter, ostensibly to Mrs. W., is
+     really both to her and to her husband. "W. H." is of course
+     Hazlitt, and the "lectures" are his famous ones on English
+     Poets. As for Lamb's criticisms on lectures generally, they
+     would perhaps be endorsed by some who have given, as well as
+     by many who have received, this form of instruction. The
+     "gentleman at Haydon's" was the hero or victim of a story
+     good, but too long to give here. He said some excessively
+     foolish things and Lamb, after dinner, behaved to him in a
+     fashion possibly not quite undeserved but entirely
+     unsanctioned by the conventions of society.
+
+
+34. TO MRS. WORDSWORTH
+
+East India House.
+    February 18, 1818.
+
+My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,
+
+I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
+sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
+consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in
+the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready
+to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
+cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
+friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home
+is, that I am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
+double animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
+the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a
+moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
+which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.
+I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his
+unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I
+could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with
+sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other, and
+yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling thoughts all my
+own,"--faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent
+friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny
+Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the
+same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean),
+or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while
+my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of
+veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the
+chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay
+science--who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of
+criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc,--what Coleridge
+said at the lecture last night--who have the form of reading men, but,
+for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as
+well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of
+an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they
+should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its
+intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary
+warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper,
+cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which
+had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one
+of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a
+moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
+mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
+them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in
+comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon, or my
+brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
+necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating
+alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come,
+and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange;
+for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not
+wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity,
+acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God bless 'em! I
+love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion
+to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and
+deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go
+before bed-time. Come never, I would say to those spoilers of my dinner;
+but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not
+happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present
+bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences,
+follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I
+am saturated with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the
+golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should
+covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in
+which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C. L. but always C. L.
+and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me
+from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget
+bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.
+Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to
+bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bedroom
+window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I
+take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of
+them), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive)
+who, being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
+play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
+some cheap composer, arranged for choruses; that is, to be sung all in
+chorus. At least I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
+nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. "That fury
+being quenched"--the howl, I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
+clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
+under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
+silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
+cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used (bless
+me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every morning by way of
+variety when he awoke:
+
+    "Every knell, the Baron saith,
+     Wakes us up to a world of death"
+
+or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is,
+that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I
+have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to
+drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a
+cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office
+confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my
+own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would
+not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could
+exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a
+late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret,
+but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured
+with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don't
+hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead
+of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W. W. etc., seven
+times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have
+scarce room to put in Mary's kind love, and my poor name,
+
+C. LAMB.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making copious use of
+quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is
+lecturing with success. I have not heard either of him or H., but dined
+with S. T. C. at Gillman's a Sunday or two since, and he was well and in
+good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course but lectures are not
+much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If _read_, they are
+dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a
+man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure
+yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in pain lest the gift of
+utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at
+the dinner given in honour of me at the London tavern.[117] "Gentlemen,"
+said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the
+necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us
+with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised.
+Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies
+and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that
+gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled
+from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an
+office. I hate all such people--accountants' deputy-accountants. The
+dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is
+unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by
+the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet
+what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all
+our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in
+the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go.
+They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this
+week they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going
+at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us.
+Dear W. W., be thankful for liberty.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[117] Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph which,
+stating that an inquest had been held on some one who, after lecturing
+somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded thus: "Verdict: death
+from natural causes."
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)
+
+
+     It is one of the commonest of commonplaces that there are
+     certain subjects and persons who and which always cause
+     difference of opinion: and something like a full century has
+     established the fact that Byron is one of them. As far as
+     his poetry is concerned we have nothing to do with this
+     difference or these differences. They affect his letters
+     less, inasmuch as almost everybody admits them to be
+     remarkably good of their kind. But when the further
+     questions are raised, "What _is_ that kind?" and "Is it the
+     best, or even a very good kind?" the old division manifests
+     itself again. That they are extraordinarily _clever_ is
+     again more or less matter of agreement. That they make some
+     people dislike him more than they otherwise might is perhaps
+     not a fatal objection: for the people may be wrong. Besides,
+     as a matter of fact, they sometimes make other people _like_
+     him more than they would have done without these letters: so
+     the two things at least cancel each other. The chief
+     objection to them, which is hardly removable, is their too
+     frequent artificiality. Byron did not play the tricks that
+     Pope played: for, he was not, like Pope, an invalid with an
+     invalid's weaknesses and excuses. But almost more than in
+     his poems, where the "dramatic" excuse is available, (_i.e._
+     that the writer is speaking not for himself but for the
+     character) the letters provoke the question, "Is this what
+     the man thought, felt, did, or what he wished to seem to
+     feel, think, do?" In other words, "Is this _persona_ or
+     _res_?" The following shows Byron in perhaps as favourable a
+     light as any that could be chosen, and with as little of the
+     artificiality as is anywhere to be found. It is true that
+     even here Moore, his biographer and letter-giver, at first
+     included, though he afterwards cut out, some attacks on Sir
+     Samuel Romilly, whom Byron thought guilty of causing or
+     abetting dissension between Lady Byron and himself. But the
+     letter loses nothing by the omission and does not even gain
+     unfairly by it. There is nothing _false_ in the contrast of
+     comedy and sentiment concerning the cemetery. His impression
+     by the epitaphs Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is
+     there any affectation in his remarks about his own burial,
+     about his children, or any other subject. They did "pickle
+     him and bring him home" (a quotation, not quite literal,
+     from Sheridan's _Rivals_), and his funeral procession
+     through London is the theme of a memorable passage in
+     Borrow's _Lavengro_. "Juan" is of course _Don Juan_.
+     "Allegra," his daughter by Jane (or as she re-christened
+     herself, Claire) Clairmont--step-daughter of Godwin, through
+     his second wife, and so a connection though no relation of
+     Mrs. Shelley--died at five years old. "Ada," his and Lady
+     Byron's only child, lived to marry Lord Lovelace, and
+     continued his blood to the present day. "Electra" works out
+     no further than the fact of her being the daughter of his
+     "_moral_ Clytemnestra," as he called Lady Byron, from her
+     having been almost as fatal to his reputation as the actual
+     Clytemnestra to her husband's life.
+
+
+35. TO MR. MURRAY
+
+Bologna, June 7. 1817.
+
+Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days ago from Ferrara. It
+will therefore be idle in him or you to wait for any further answers or
+returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no English
+letters be sent after me. The publication can be proceeded in without,
+and I am already sick of your remarks, to which I think not the least
+attention ought to be paid.
+
+Tell Mr. Hobhouse that since I wrote to him I had availed myself of my
+Ferrara letters, and found the society much younger and better than that
+at Venice. I am very much pleased with the little the shortness of my
+stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count Mosti, and his family
+and friends in general.
+
+I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and
+Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful
+cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls and found, besides the superb
+burial ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the
+gravedigger in _Hamlet_.
+
+He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and
+taking down one of them said "This is Brother Desiderio Birro, who died
+at forty--one of my best friends. I begged his head of his brethren
+after his decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime and then boiled
+it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation. He was the
+merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went he brought joy,
+and whenever anyone was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make
+him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for
+a dancer--he joked--he laughed--oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw
+before, nor ever shall again!"
+
+He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the
+cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead
+people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In
+showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty,
+with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two centuries
+ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found her hair
+complete, and "as yellow as gold."[118] Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara
+pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for
+instance:--
+
+"MARTINI LUIGI
+IMPLORA PACE."
+
+"LUCREZIA PICINI
+IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE."
+
+Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be
+said or sought, the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was
+rest, and this they _implore_!
+
+There is all the helplessness and humble hope, and deathlike prayer,
+that can arise from the grave--'implora pace.' I hope, whoever may
+survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at
+the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words,
+and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of "pickling, and
+bringing me home to clod or Blunderbuss Hall." I am sure my bones would
+not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that
+country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could
+I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my
+carcass back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms if I could
+help it.
+
+So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who
+died at Venice (see _Richard II._), that he, after fighting
+
+    "Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens,
+     And toiled with works of war, retired himself
+     To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
+     His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth.
+     And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
+     Under whose colours he had fought so long!"
+
+Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr.
+Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for further answers from me, but
+address yours to Venice as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I
+may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends
+on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well, as well as his son and
+Mrs. Hoppner. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty;
+her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her
+ways, Mrs. H. says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will
+make, in that case, a manageable young lady.
+
+I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae.
+But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see
+it. What a long letter I have scribbled.
+
+Yours &c.
+
+P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a
+quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at
+Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[118] No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer two
+thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though _her_
+tresses are not "yellow."
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
+
+
+     It may sometimes seem as if there were only two things that
+     Shelley lacked--humour and common sense. As a matter of fact
+     he possessed both, but allowed them to be perpetually
+     stifled by other elements--not in themselves necessarily
+     bad--of his character. If either--still better both--had
+     been able to constitute themselves monarchs of his
+     Brentford, Duumvirs of the rest, his political and religious
+     extravagances would have been curbed; his less admirable
+     actions would probably--for he would not have married and
+     therefore would not have deserted poor Harriet--have been
+     obviated; and it is by no means necessary that his poetry,
+     though it could not have been much improved, should have
+     been in any degree worsened. Shakespeare, one thinks, had
+     plenty of both. Nor is this consideration irrelevant to the
+     study of his letters. There are glimmerings of the humour
+     which shines in _Peter Bell the Third_, and more of the
+     common sense which is not needed, but by no means negatived,
+     in the sublimer poems. But in the case suggested we should
+     certainly have had more of them in a department than which
+     they could have found no better home. Shelley wrote
+     everything (after his intellectual infancy) that he did
+     write, so excellently that he must have excelled here also.
+     As it is, we must take him as we find him and be thankful.
+     Since he wrote the following, English readers have perhaps
+     been satiated with writings about Art. But rather more than
+     100 years ago there had been comparatively little of it and
+     hardly anything, if anything at all, of this quality. And it
+     may not be absurd to draw attention to the differences
+     between these descriptions and those in ornate prose that
+     we have had since from Mr. Ruskin and others. Most of the
+     latter are essentially prose though often very beautiful
+     prose: Shelley's, though pure prose in form, are as it were
+     scenarios for poetry. Indeed by this time poetry had taken
+     almost entire possession of him, and he of her.
+
+
+36. TO THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
+
+BOLOGNA,
+Monday, Nov[ember] 9, 1818.
+
+My dear Peacock,
+
+I have seen a quantity of things here--churches, palaces, statues,
+fountains, and pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio
+of an architect, or a print-shop, or a commonplace-book, I will try to
+recollect something of what I have seen; for, indeed, it requires, if it
+will obey, an act of volition. First, we went to the cathedral, which
+contains nothing remarkable, except a kind of shrine, or rather a marble
+canopy, loaded with sculptures, and supported on four marble columns. We
+went then to a palace--I am sure I forget the name of it--where we saw a
+large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three
+hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember, however,
+an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which
+Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were,
+to the flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna. There was
+an exquisitely executed piece of Correggio, about four saints, one of
+whom seemed to have a pet dragon in a leash. I was told that it was the
+devil who was bound in that style--but who can make anything of four
+saints? For what can they be supposed to be about? There was one
+painting, indeed, by this master, Christ beatified, inexpressibly fine.
+It is a half figure, seated on a mass of clouds, tinged with an
+ethereal, rose-like lustre; the arms are expanded; the whole frame seems
+dilated with expression; the countenance is heavy, as it were, with the
+weight of the rapture of the spirit; the lips parted, but scarcely
+parted, with the breath of intense but regulated passion; the eyes are
+calm and benignant; the whole features harmonised in majesty and
+sweetness. The hair is parted on the forehead, and falls in heavy locks
+on each side. It is motionless, but seems as if the faintest breath
+would move it. The colouring, I suppose, must be very good, if I could
+remark and understand it. The sky is of pale aërial orange, like the
+tints of latest sunset; it does not seem painted around and beyond the
+figure, but everything seems to have absorbed, and to have been
+penetrated by its hues. I do not think we saw any other of Correggio,
+but this specimen gives me a very exalted idea of his powers.
+
+We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces--Ranuzzi,
+Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian names for any purpose,
+here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel. I saw
+many more of Guido. One, a Samson drinking water out of an ass's
+jaw-bone, in the midst of the slaughtered Philistines. Why he is
+supposed to do this, God, who gave him this jaw-bone, alone knows--but
+certain it is, that the painting is a very fine one. The figure of
+Samson stands in strong relief in the foreground, coloured, as it were,
+in the hues of human life, and full of strength and elegance. Round him
+lie the Philistines in all the attitudes of death. One prone, with the
+slight convulsion of pain just passing from his forehead, whilst on his
+lips and chin death lies as heavy as sleep. Another leaning on his arm,
+with his hand, white and motionless, hanging out beyond. In the
+distance, more dead bodies; and, still further beyond, the blue sea and
+the blue mountains, and one white and tranquil sail.
+
+There is a Murder of the Innocents, also, by Guido, finely coloured,
+with much fine expression--but the subject is very horrible, and it
+seemed deficient in strength--at least, you require the highest ideal
+energy, the most poetical and exalted conception of the subject, to
+reconcile you to such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ
+crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may
+be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and
+agonised form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of
+torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of
+passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair,
+and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate
+compassion; his hands clasped, and his fingers twisting themselves
+together, as it were, with involuntary anguish; his feet almost writhing
+up from the ground with the same sympathy; and the whole of this arrayed
+in colours of diviner nature, yet most like nature's self. Of the
+contemplation of this one would never weary.
+
+There was a "Fortune," too, of Guido; a piece of mere beauty. There was
+the figure of Fortune on a globe, eagerly proceeding onwards, and Love
+was trying to catch her back by the hair, and her face was half turned
+towards him; her long chestnut hair was floating in the stream of the
+wind, and threw its shadow over her fair forehead. Her hazel eyes were
+fixed on her pursuer, with a meaning look of playfulness, and a light
+smile was hovering on her lips. The colours which arrayed her delicate
+limbs were ethereal and warm.
+
+But, perhaps, the most interesting of all the pictures of Guido which I
+saw was a Madonna Lattante. She is leaning over her child, and the
+maternal feelings with which she is pervaded are shadowed forth on her
+soft and gentle countenance, and in her simple and affectionate
+gestures--there is what an unfeeling observer would call a dulness in
+the expression of her face; her eyes are almost closed; her lip
+depressed; there is a serious, and even a heavy relaxation, as it were,
+of all the muscles which are called into action by ordinary emotions:
+but it is only as if the spirit of love, almost insupportable from its
+intensity, were brooding over and weighing down the soul, or whatever it
+is, without which the material frame is inanimate and inexpressive.
+
+There is another painter here, called Franceschini, a Bolognese, who,
+though certainly very inferior to Guido, is yet a person of excellent
+powers. One entire church, that of Santa Catarina, is covered by his
+works. I do not know whether any of his pictures have ever been seen in
+England. His colouring is less warm than that of Guido, but nothing can
+be more clear and delicate; it is as if he could have dipped his pencil
+in the hues of some serenest and star-shining twilight. His forms have
+the same delicacy and aërial loveliness; their eyes are all bright with
+innocence and love; their lips scarce divided by some gentle and sweet
+emotion. His winged children are the loveliest ideal beings ever created
+by the human mind. These are generally, whether in the capacity of
+Cherubim or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture; and the
+underplot of their lovely and infantine play is something almost
+pathetic from the excess of its unpretending beauty. One of the best of
+his pieces is an Annunciation of the Virgin:--the Angel is beaming in
+beauty; the Virgin, soft, retiring, and simple.
+
+We saw, besides, one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia: this is in another
+and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it; and
+yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is
+of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
+executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the
+ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the
+baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
+perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
+Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
+painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut
+hair flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
+countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
+and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She
+is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased
+to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by
+their attitudes, towards her; particularly St. John, who, with a tender
+yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with
+the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music,
+broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not speak; it eclipses
+nature, yet it has all her truth and softness.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
+
+
+     A good deal has already been said of Keats in the
+     Introduction; but a little more may be pardoned on that most
+     remarkable correspondence with his brother and sister-in-law
+     which is there mentioned, and which it is hoped may be
+     fairly sampled here. There is nothing quite like it: and one
+     can only be thankful to the Atlantic (which here at least
+     can have "disappointed" nobody worth mentioning) for causing
+     the separation that brought it about. The inspirations which
+     it shows were happily double. We do not know very much about
+     George Keats, but John's family affection was of the
+     keenest, and this was the only member of the family who was,
+     in all the circumstances, likely to sympathise thoroughly
+     with the poet in his poetry as in other things. Georgiana is
+     said to have been personally attractive and mentally gifted
+     beyond the common: and there is no doubt that this excited
+     something more than mere family devotion in such an
+     impressionable person as Keats. The combined reagency of
+     these relatives has given us what we have from no other
+     English poet--for the simple reason that no other English
+     poet has had such a chance of giving it to us. The only
+     thing to regret is that it could not continue longer: and
+     that is only a necessary operation of Fate. The particular
+     passage chosen here is one of the best known perhaps, but it
+     is also one of the most illuminating: for it gives at once
+     Keats's natural and simple interest in ordinary things, with
+     no mere trivialities: his _real_ attitude (so different from
+     that long attributed to him!) as regards the attacks of
+     critics, and his passion for beauty apart from mere
+     hedonism. The "Charmian" was at one time supposed to be
+     Miss Brawne: but this was an error. She was a Miss Jane Cox,
+     and nothing is heard of her afterwards.
+
+
+37. TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS
+
+[October 14 or 15, 1818]
+
+I came by ship from Inverness, and was nine days at Sea without being
+sick. A little qualm now and then put me in mind of you; however, as
+soon as you touch the shore, all the horrors of sickness are soon
+forgotten, as was the case with a lady on board, who could not hold her
+head up all the way. We had not been in the Thames an hour before her
+tongue began to some tune--paying off, as it was fit she should, all old
+scores. I was the only Englishman on board. There was a downright
+Scotchman, who, hearing that there had been a bad crop of potatoes in
+England, had brought some triumphant specimens from Scotland. These he
+exhibited with national pride to all the ignorant lightermen and
+watermen from the Nore to the Bridge. I fed upon beef all the way; not
+being able to eat the thick porridge which the Ladies managed to manage,
+with large, awkward, horn spoons into the bargain. Reynolds has returned
+from a six-weeks' enjoyment in Devonshire; he is well, and persuades me
+to publish my "Pot of Basil" as an answer to the attacks made on me in
+"Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Quarterly Review." There have been two
+Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and one in the Examiner, copied
+from the Exeter Paper, and written by Reynolds. I do not know who wrote
+those in the Chronicle. This is a mere matter of the moment--I think I
+shall be among the English Poets after my death. Even as a Matter of
+present interest the attempt to crush me in the "Quarterly" has only
+brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among
+book-men, "I wonder the Quarterly should cut its own throat." It does me
+not the least harm in Society to make me appear little and ridiculous: I
+know when a man is superior to me and give him all due respect; he will
+be the last to laugh at me; and as for the rest I feel that I make an
+impression upon them which insures me personal respect while I am in
+sight, whatever they may say when my back is turned.
+
+The Misses ---- are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me
+much, and in this way: Now I am coming the Richardson! On my return, the
+first day I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
+Cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her Grandpapa in a serious
+manner, was invited by Mrs. ---- to take asylum in her house. She is an
+East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather's heir. At the time I
+called, Mrs. ---- was in conference with her upstairs, and the young
+ladies were warm in her praises downstairs, calling her genteel,
+interesting and a thousand other pretty things to which I gave no heed,
+not being partial to nine-days' wonders--Now all is completely
+changed--they hate her, and from what I hear she is not without faults
+of a real kind: but she has others, which are more apt to make women of
+inferior charms hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a
+Charmian. She has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine
+manners. When she comes into the room she makes an impression the same
+as the Beauty of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of
+herself to repulse any Man who may address her; from habit she thinks
+that nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such
+a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation
+which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times
+too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget
+myself entirely, because I live in her. You will, by this time, think
+that I am in love with her, so, before I go any further, I will tell you
+I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
+speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel
+none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very "yes"
+and "no" of whose life is to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon
+home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like
+her, and her like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is
+taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much talk with
+her--no such thing; there are the Misses ----on the look out. They think
+I don't admire her because I don't stare at her; they call her a flirt
+to me--what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a
+manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power; this they
+call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman
+is. I believe, though, she has faults; the same as Charmian and
+Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly
+way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of
+things--the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
+spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron and this
+Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard,
+Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are
+the conquering feelings. As a man of the world I love the rich talk of
+a Charmian; as an eternal being I love the thought of you. I should
+like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.
+
+    "I am free from men of pleasure's cares,
+     By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs."
+
+This is "Lord Byron," and is one of the finest things he has said.
+
+
+
+
+THE CARLYLES--THOMAS (1795-1881) AND
+JANE WELSH (1801-1866)
+
+
+     A paradoxer, even of a less virulent-frivolous type than
+     that with which we have been recently afflicted, might
+     sustain, for some little time at any rate, the argument
+     against preservation of letters from the case of this
+     eminent couple. If Mrs. Carlyle had not written hers, or if
+     they had remained unknown, the whole sickening controversy
+     about the character and married life of the pair might, as
+     was said in the Introduction, never have existed. And if
+     Carlyle himself had written none, persons of any
+     intelligence would still have had a pretty adequate idea of
+     him from his _Works_. On the other hand the addition to
+     knowledge in his case is quite welcome: and in hers it
+     practically gives us what we could hardly have known
+     otherwise--one of the most remarkable of woman-natures, and
+     one of the most striking confirmations of the merciless
+     adage "Whom the gods curse, to them they grant the desires
+     of their hearts." For she wanted above all things to be the
+     wife of a man of genius--and she was. So the _pro_ and the
+     _con_ in this matter may so far be set against each other.
+     But there remains to credit a considerable amount of most
+     welcome and (notably in the instance specified in the
+     Introduction) almost consummate literature of the epistolary
+     kind. This instance itself is perhaps too tragic for our
+     little collection: indeed it might help to spread the
+     exaggerated idea of the writer's unhappiness which has been
+     too prevalent already. There is some "metal more attractive"
+     in her letters, which perhaps, taken all round, put her with
+     Madame de Sévigné and "Lady Mary" at the head of all
+     _published_ women letter-writers. And Carlyle's annotations
+     to them, when not too bilious or too penitent, show him
+     almost at his best. His own (given below) to FitzGerald (the
+     way in which epistolary literature interconnects itself has
+     been noted) appears to me one of his most characteristic
+     though least volcanic utterances. It was written while he
+     was in the depths of what his wife called "the Valley of the
+     Shadow of Frederick," (_i.e._ his vast book on that amiable
+     monarch) and had retired to _extra_-solitude in consequence.
+     "Farlingay" refers to a recent stay in Suffolk with
+     FitzGerald. As often with Carlyle, there may be more than
+     one interpretation of his inverted commas at "gentleman" as
+     regards Voltaire, to whom he certainly would not have
+     allotted the word in its best sense. The phrase about Chaos
+     and the Evil Genius is Carlyle shut up in narrow space like
+     the other genius or genie in the Arabian Nights. The "_awful
+     jangle_ of bells" speaks his horror of any invading sound.
+     The "Naseby matter" refers to a monument which he and
+     FitzGerald had planned, and which (with the precedent
+     investigation as to the battle which F. had conducted years
+     before for his _Cromwell_), occupies a good deal of
+     FitzGerald's own correspondence. Indeed, it is thanks to
+     Naseby that we possess this very letter. FitzGerald says
+     elsewhere that he kept only these Naseby letters of all
+     Carlyle's correspondence with him, destroying the rest, as
+     he did Thackeray's and Tennyson's, lest "private personal
+     history should fall into some unscrupulous hands." One
+     admires the conduct while one feels the loss. As for the
+     monument, it never came off: though it was talked about for
+     some thirty years. Mrs. Carlyle's--one of the early and,
+     despite complaints, cheerful time, the other later and,
+     despite its resignation, from "the Valley of the
+     Shadow"--require no annotation, save in respect of Carlyle's
+     own on _Deerbrook_. He might well call it "poor": it is
+     indeed one of the few novels by a writer of any distinction,
+     which one tolerably voracious novel-reader has found
+     incapable of being read. And this is curious: for she had
+     written good stories earlier.
+
+
+38. TO EDWARD FITZGERALD
+
+ADDISCOMBE FARM, CROYDON.
+15th Septr. 1855
+
+Dear Fitzgerald,
+
+I have been here ever since the day you last heard of me; leading the
+strangest life of absolute _Latrappism_; and often enough remembering
+Farlingay and you. I live perfectly alone, and without speech at
+all,--there being in fact nobody to speak to, except one austerely
+punctual housemaid, who does her functions, like an eight-day clock,
+generally without bidding. My wife comes out now and then to give the
+requisite directions; but commonly withdraws again on the morrow,
+leaving the monster to himself and his own ways. I have Books; a
+complete Edition of _Voltaire_, for one Book, in which I read for _use_,
+or for idleness oftenest,--getting into endless reflexions over it,
+mostly of a sad and not very utterable nature. I find V. a 'gentleman,'
+living in a world partly furnished with such; and that there are now
+almost no 'gentlemen' (not quite _none_): this is one great head of my
+reflexions, to which there is no visible _tail_ or finish. I have also a
+Horse (borrowed from my fat Yeoman friend, who is at sea-bathing in
+Sussex); and I go riding, at great lengths daily, over hill and dale;
+this I believe is really the main good I am doing,--if in this either
+there be much good. But it is a strange way of life to me, for the time;
+perhaps not unprofitable; To let _Chaos_ say out its say, then, and
+one's Evil Genius give one the very worst language he has, for a while.
+It is still to last for a week or more. Today, for the first time, I
+ride back to Chelsea, but mean to return hither on Monday. There is a
+great circle of yellow light all the way from Shooter's Hill to Primrose
+Hill, spread round my horizon every night, I see it while smoking my
+pipe before bed (so bright, last night, it cast a visible shadow of me
+against the white window-shutters); and this is all I have to do with
+London and its _gases_ for a fortnight or more. My wife writes to me,
+there was an awful jangle of bells last day she went home from this; a
+Quaker asked in the railway, of some porter, 'Can thou tell me what
+these bells mean?'--'Well, I suppose something is up. They say
+Sebastopol is took, and the Rushans run away.'--_À la bonne heure_; but
+won't they come back again, think you?
+
+On the whole I say, when you get your little Suffolk cottage, you must
+have in it a 'chamber in the wall' for me, _plus_ a pony that can trot,
+and a cow that gives good milk: with these outfits we shall make a
+pretty rustication now and then, not wholly _Latrappish_, but only
+_half_, on much easier terms than here; and I shall be right willing to
+come and try it, I for one party.--Meanwhile, I hope the Naseby matter
+is steadily going ahead; sale _completed_; and even the _monument_
+concern making way. Tell me a little how that and other matters are. If
+you are at home, a line is rapidly conveyed hither, steam all the way:
+after the beginning of the next week, I am at Chelsea, and (I dare so)
+there is a fire in the evenings now to welcome you there. Shew face in
+some way or other.
+
+And so adieu; for my hour of riding is at hand.
+
+Yours ever truly,
+
+T. CARLYLE.
+
+
+39. TO MRS. WALSH,
+
+CHELSEA: Sept. 5, 1836.
+
+My dear Aunt,
+
+Now that I am fairly settled at home again, and can look back over my
+late travels with the coolness of a spectator, it seems to me that I
+must have tired out all men, women and children that have had to do with
+me by the road. The proverb says 'there is much ado when cadgers ride.'
+I do not know precisely what 'cadger' means, but I imagine it to be a
+character like me, liable to head-ache, to sea-sickness, to all the
+infirmities 'that flesh is heir to,' and a few others besides; the
+friends and relations of cadgers should therefore use all soft
+persuasions to induce them to remain at home.[119]
+
+I got into that Mail the other night with as much repugnance and
+trepidation as if it had been a Phalaris' brazen bull, instead of a
+Christian vehicle, invented for purposes of mercy--not of cruelty. There
+were three besides myself when we started, but two dropped off at the
+end of the first stage, and the rest of the way I had, as usual, half of
+the coach to myself. My fellow-passenger had that highest of all
+terrestrial qualities, which for me a fellow-passenger can possess--he
+was silent. I think his name was Roscoe, and he read sundry long papers
+to himself, with the pondering air of a lawyer.
+
+We breakfasted at Lichfield, at five in the morning, on muddy coffee and
+scorched toast, which made me once more lyrically recognise in my heart
+(not without a sign of regret) the very different coffee and toast with
+which you helped me out of my headache. At two there was another stop of
+ten minutes, that might be employed in lunching or otherwise. Feeling
+myself more fevered than hungry, I determined on spending the time in
+combing my hair and washing my face and hands with vinegar. In the midst
+of this solacing operation I heard what seemed to be the Mail running
+its rapid course, and quick as lightning it flashed on me, 'There it
+goes! and my luggage is on the top of it, and my purse is in the pocket
+of it, and here am I stranded on an unknown beach, without so much as a
+sixpence in my pocket to pay for the vinegar I have already consumed!'
+Without my bonnet, my hair hanging down my back, my face half dried, and
+the towel, with which I was drying it, firm grasped in my hand, I dashed
+out--along, down, opening wrong doors, stumbling over steps, cursing the
+day I was born, still more the day on which I took a notion to travel,
+and arrived finally at the bar of the Inn, in a state of excitement
+bordering on lunacy. The barmaids looked at me 'with wonder and
+amazement.' 'Is the coach gone?' I gasped out. 'The coach? Yes!' 'Oh!
+and you have let it away without me! Oh! stop it, cannot you stop it?'
+and out I rushed into the street, with streaming hair and streaming
+towel, and almost brained myself against--the Mail! which was standing
+there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had
+heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I
+ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put
+on my bonnet, and came back 'a sadder and a wiser woman.'
+
+I did not find my husband at the 'Swan with Two Necks'; for we were in a
+quarter of an hour before the appointed time. So I had my luggage put
+on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, where I
+presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By and by, however, the omnibus
+stopped, and amid cries of 'No room, sir,' 'Can't get in,' Carlyle's
+face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the
+door, like the Peri, who, 'at the Gate of Heaven, stood disconsolate.'
+In hurrying along the Strand, pretty sure of being too late, amidst all
+the imaginable and unimaginable phenomena which the immense thoroughfare
+of a street presents, his eye (Heaven bless the mark!) had lighted on my
+trunk perched on the top of the omnibus, and had recognised it. This
+seems to me one of the most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever
+manifested. Happily, a passenger went out a little further on, and then
+he got in.
+
+My brother-in-law had gone two days before, so my arrival was most
+well-timed. I found all at home right and tight; my maid seems to have
+conducted herself quite handsomely in my absence; my best room looked
+really inviting. A bust of Shelley (a present from Leigh Hunt), and a
+fine print of Albert Durer, handsomely framed (also a present) had still
+further ornamented it during my absence. I also found (for I wish to
+tell you all my satisfaction) every grate in the house furnished with a
+supply of coloured clippings, and the holes in the stair-carpet all
+darned, so that it looks like new. They gave me tea and fried bacon, and
+staved off my headache as well as might be. They were very kind to me,
+but, on my life, everybody is kind to me, and to a degree that fills me
+with admiration. I feel so strong a wish to make you all convinced how
+very deeply I feel your kindness, and just the more I would say, the
+less able I am to say anything.
+
+God bless you all. Love to all, from the head of the house down to
+Johnny.
+
+Your affectionate,
+
+JANE W. CARLYLE.
+
+
+40. TO MRS. STIRLING, HILL STREET, EDINBURGH.
+
+5 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA: October 21, 1859.
+
+You dear nice woman! there you are! a bright cheering apparition to
+surprise one on a foggy October morning, over one's breakfast--that most
+trying institution for people who are 'nervous' and 'don't sleep!'
+
+It (the photograph) made our breakfast this morning 'pass off,' like the
+better sort of breakfasts in Deerbrook,[120] in which people seemed to
+have come into the world chiefly to eat breakfast in every possible
+variety of temper!
+
+Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the
+inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor
+suffering humanity than anything that has 'cast[121] up' in my time or
+is like to--this art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves of
+tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting
+favourably on the morality of the country? I assure you I have often
+gone into my own room, in the devil's own humour--ready to answer at
+'things in general,' and some things in particular--and, my eyes resting
+by chance on one of my photographs of long-ago places and people, a
+crowd of sad, gentle thoughts has rushed into my heart, and driven the
+devil out, as clean as ever so much holy water and priestly exorcism
+could have done! I have a photograph of Haddington church tower, and my
+father's tombstone in it--of every place I ever lived at as a
+home--photographs of old lovers! old friends, old servants, old dogs! In
+a day or two, you, dear, will be framed and hung up among the 'friends.'
+And that bright, kind, indomitable face of yours will not be the least
+efficacious face there for exorcising my devil, when I have him! Thank
+you a thousand times for keeping your word! Of course you would--that is
+just the beauty of you, that you never deceive nor disappoint.
+
+Oh my dear! my dear! how awfully tired I was with the journey home, and
+yet I had taken two days to it, sleeping--that is, attempting to
+sleep--at York. What a pity it is that Scotland is so far off! all the
+good one has gained there gets shaken off one in the terrific journey
+home again, and then the different atmosphere is so trying to one fresh
+from the pure air of Fife--so exhausting and depressing. If it hadn't
+been that I had a deal of housemaiding to execute during the week I was
+here before Mr. C. returned, I must have given occasion for newspaper
+paragraphs under the head of 'Melancholy Suicide.' But dusting books,
+making chair covers, and 'all that sort of thing,' leads one on
+insensibly to live--till the crisis gets safely passed.
+
+My dear! I haven't time nor inclination for much letter-writing--nor
+have you, I should suppose, but do let us exchange letters now and then.
+A friendship which has lived on air for so many years together is worth
+the trouble of giving it a little human sustenance.
+
+Give my kind regards to your husband--I like him--and believe me,
+
+Your ever affectionate,
+
+JANE WELSH CARLYLE.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[119] Clever as she was, she surely made a mistake here--unless she did
+it on purpose, which is quite possible. "Cadger" is of course only
+"beggar," and the proverb is the Scotch equivalent of ours about the
+"beggar on horseback," pretty frequently illustrated now-a-days.
+
+[120] The Deerbrook breakfasts refer to Miss Martineau's poor novel. (T.
+C.)
+
+[121] Turned. (T. C.)
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)
+
+
+     There are very few examples in biography where the
+     publication of letters has had a happier effect on the
+     general idea of the writer than in Macaulay's case. It is
+     not here a question of historical trustworthiness, or even
+     of literary-style, in both which respects he has come in for
+     severe strictures and sometimes for rather half-hearted
+     defence. Nor do the letters display any purely literary
+     gifts in him (except perhaps a playfulness of humour or at
+     least wit) which do not appear in the _History_ and the
+     _Essays_. But, as the exception may perhaps partly indicate,
+     they extend and improve the notion of his personality in the
+     most remarkable fashion. Even those who did not quarrel with
+     his views sometimes, before Sir George Trevelyan's book,
+     disliked and regretted what have been called his "pistolling
+     ways"--the positive, hectoring "hold-your-tongue" sort of
+     tone which dominated his productions. With the very rarest
+     exceptions, themselves sometimes of a revealing and
+     excusable frankness, this tone is, if not quite absent[122]
+     from, much seldomer present in, his letters. He jokes
+     without difficulty; talks without in the least monopolising
+     the conversation; shows himself often willing to live and
+     let live; and is on the whole as different a person as
+     possible from the Macaulay who is sure that "every
+     schoolboy" knows better than the author he is reviewing, and
+     who finds Johnson guilty of superstition and Swift of
+     apostasy. "Happy thrice and more also" are those whose
+     letters thus vindicate them. I have purposely chosen the
+     following example (written to his sister) from the most
+     _mundane_ class. "Appointment" was to the _Indian_ Council,
+     which explains the "Cotton" and "Muslin" and other things.
+     "Ellis" (Thomas Flower), a friend of Macaulay's from
+     Cambridge days and his literary executor in part.
+     "Lushington" (Stephen), a civilian lawyer of great eminence
+     as a judge in Admiralty and ecclesiastical matters, but a
+     rather violent politician. "Town"--Leeds. "Miss Berry" is
+     annotated elsewhere. "Sir Stratford Canning," later Viscount
+     Stratford de Redcliffe, George Canning's cousin, and one of
+     the most famous diplomatists of the nineteenth century,
+     especially during his long tenure of the Embassy at
+     Constantinople. _Vivian Grey_--Disraeli's first novel. "Lady
+     Holland," the most famous hostess on the Whig side in the
+     first half of the nineteenth century, but, by all accounts,
+     a person now and then quite intolerable. "Allen" (John), an
+     _Edinburgh Reviewer_, was familiarly called her "tame
+     atheist" (All the company were of the Holland House "set").
+     "Bobus"--Robert Percy Smith, Sydney's elder brother, a great
+     wit and scholar. "Cosher," an Irish word, is not always used
+     in this sense of "chat."
+
+
+41. TO HIS SISTER
+
+LONDON: November 1833.
+
+Dear Hannah,
+
+Things stand as they stood; except that the report of my appointment is
+every day spreading more widely; and that I am beset by advertising
+dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me, and
+fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my
+secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just
+received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my
+intentions till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so
+plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few indeed
+from whom I shall part with so much pain; and he, poor fellow, says
+that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most
+thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited
+confidence.
+
+On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by
+the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with
+importunities to attend and make a speech for him; and my father has
+joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a
+man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand
+people to keep his own constituents in good humour; and the Spitalfields
+weavers and Whitechapel butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I
+succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous
+attempt of the kind ever made,--I mean in persuading an audience of
+manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of
+the corn-laws was impossible,--I have been considered as a capital
+physician for desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that
+delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not very popular
+with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me
+would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was
+by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the
+11th, but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable
+that I should be out of town.
+
+I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's _soirée_. I do not know whether I
+told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir
+Stratford Canning advised me not to go near her. She was Walpole's
+greatest favourite. His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of
+the most gallant eulogy. When he was dying at past eighty, he asked her
+to marry him, merely that he might make her a Countess and leave her his
+fortune. You know that in _Vivian Grey_ she is called Miss Otranto. I
+always expected that my article would put her into a passion, and I was
+not mistaken; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing
+and kind invitation the other day.
+
+I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers, and once
+with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to
+Rogers's, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to
+rally, and make common cause against her. There was not a person at
+table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit.
+Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked
+excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward
+rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest
+civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with
+Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous. When
+she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down
+with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the
+evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing up in defence of his
+patroness the best thing that he has seen in him. No sooner had Tom and
+I got into the street than he broke forth: "That such an old stager as
+Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment
+to anything but his dinner! Allen was bursting with envy to see us so
+free, while he was conscious of his own slavery."
+
+Her Ladyship has been the better for this discipline. She has
+overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and invitations. I have at
+last found out the cause of her ill-humour, or at least of that portion
+of it of which I was the object. She is in a rage at my article on
+Walpole, but at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very
+intimate with the Waldegraves, to whom the manuscripts belong, and for
+whose benefit the letters were published. But my review was surely not
+calculated to injure the sale of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an
+aside, that he quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss
+the subject.
+
+A note; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland: "Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray
+wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady.
+I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the
+Directors of the East India Company; now my servants; next week, I hope,
+to be my masters.
+
+Ever yours,
+
+T. B. M.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[122] Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about "What is
+bred in the bone," etc.--as for instance when, while admitting
+Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the _Letters_ "for
+the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to call such criticism
+itself "trashy."
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)
+
+
+     Beddoes belongs to the small but remarkable company of
+     authors who, making little mark in their own time and none
+     at all for some time afterwards, before very long come into
+     something like their due, though they never can be exactly
+     popular. He was certainly very eccentric and possibly quite
+     mad: the circumstances of his suicide do more than justify
+     the hopes of charity and the convention of coroners' juries,
+     as to the latter conclusion. But he was an extremely
+     poetical poet and a letter-writer of remarkable
+     individuality and zest. Little notice seems to have been
+     taken, by any save a very few elect, of the first collected
+     publication of his work just after his death: though a
+     single piece, _The Bride's Tragedy_, not by any means his
+     best, had obtained praise in 1822--a time between the great
+     poetical outburst of the early nineteenth century and the
+     revival of its middle period. But Mr. Gosse's reissue in
+     completer form of the _Poems_ in 1890 and the _Letters_ four
+     years later, lodged him at once in the affection of all
+     competent critics. With something of the more eccentric
+     spirit of the seventeenth century in him, and something of
+     the Romantic revival as shown in Coleridge, Shelley and
+     Keats, he had much of his own, though he never got it
+     thoroughly or sustainedly organised and expressed. His
+     mingled passion and humour (especially the latter)
+     "escape"--make fitful spurts and explosions--in his
+     correspondence. Latterly this reflects his mental breakdown,
+     increasingly in the prose; though only a few years before
+     the end it contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The
+     swallow leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and
+     Canon Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is
+     nothing beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good
+     share, but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly
+     heralds, though the thing is first definitely indicated in a
+     later letter, Beddoes' marvellous tragedy _Death's
+     Jest-book_, which he wrote and re-wrote till it became like
+     the picture in Balzac's story an "Unknown [and Unknowable]
+     Masterpiece." The letter is further remarkable as combining
+     intense admiration for the _old_ masterpieces with a quite
+     "modern" insistence on "begetting" rather than
+     "reviving"--on "giving the literature of the age a spirit of
+     its own," etc. For details: "Sulky" (compare the French
+     _désobligeante_, celebrated by Sterne)--an obsolete form of
+     chaise. "Breaking Priscian's head" is familiar enough for
+     "using bad grammar," which the book-keeper very likely did;
+     but the explanation may be more remote. "Like a ghost from
+     the tomb" though not "quoted" is, of course, his beloved
+     Shelley's ("The Cloud"). "_Biped_ knock" = merely
+     "double"--the peculiar rat-tat which postmen have mostly
+     forgotten or not learnt--perhaps regarding it as a badge of
+     slavery like "tips." _The Fatal Dowry_--attributed to (Field
+     and) Massinger, and spoilt by Rowe into his nevertheless
+     popular _Fair Penitent_,--is one of the finest examples of
+     the second stage of Elizabethan drama. _Ultracrepidarian_--a
+     term derived from the Latin proverb _ne sutor supra_ (or
+     _ultra_) _crepidam_ and specially applied to the unpopular
+     critic Gifford who had been a shoemaker--meaning generally
+     "some one who _does_ go beyond his last and meddles with
+     things he does not understand." "McCready's" (Macready, the
+     famous actor and manager) friend Walker was probably Sidney
+     Walker the Shakespearian critic.
+
+
+42. TO THOMAS FORBES KELSALL
+
+26 MALL, CLIFTON.
+(Postmark, Jan. 11. 1825)
+
+Dear Kelsall--
+
+Day after day since Christmas I have intended to write or go to London,
+and day after day I have deferred both projects; and now I will give you
+the adventures and mishaps of this present sunday. Remorse, and
+startling conscience, in the form of an old, sulky, and a shying, horse,
+hurried me to the 'Regulator' coach-office on Saturday: 'Does the
+Regulator and its team conform to the Mosaic decalogue, Mr.
+Book-keeper?' He broke Priscian's head, and through the aperture,
+assured me that it did not: I was booked for the inside:--"Call at 26
+Mall for me."--"Yes, Sir, at 1/2 past five, A.M."--At five I rose like a
+ghost from the tomb, and betook me to coffee. No wheels rolled through
+the streets but the inaudible ones of that uncreated hour. It struck
+six,--a coach was called,--we hurried to the office but _the_ coach was
+gone. Here followed a long Brutus-and-Cassius discourse between a
+shilling-buttoned-waistcoatteer of a porter and myself, which ended in
+my extending mercy to the suppliant coach-owners, and agreeing to accept
+a place for Monday. All well thus far. The biped knock of the post
+alighted on the door at twelve, and two letters were placed upon my
+German dictionary,--your own, which I at first intended to reply to vivâ
+voce, had not the second informed me of my brother's arrival in England,
+his short leave of absence, and his intention to visit me here next
+week. This twisted my strong purpose like a thread, and disposed me to
+remain here about ten days longer. On the 21st at latest I go to
+London. Be there and I will join you, or, if not, pursue you to
+Southampton.
+
+The Fatal Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind
+ultra-crepidarian--McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but
+nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered
+very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an
+excrescence,--re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more
+ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most
+purple piece in the whole web--the end of the fourth Act--and shouldered
+himself into toleration through the prejudices of the pit, when he
+should have built his admiration on their necks. Say what you will, I am
+convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling
+fellow, no creeper into worm-holes, no reviver even, however good. These
+reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c. are
+better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of
+ours, but they are ghosts; the worm is in their pages; and we want to
+see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest
+reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we
+had better beget than revive; attempt to give the literature of this age
+an idiosyncrasy and spirit of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze
+on, not to live with--just now the drama is a haunted ruin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861)
+
+
+     Mrs. Browning was in the habit of using rather extravagant
+     language herself: and she has certainly been the victim of
+     language extravagant enough both in praise (the more
+     damaging of the two) and blame from others. FitzGerald's
+     unlucky exaggeration (see Introduction) in one way may be
+     set off by such opposite assertions as that some of her
+     poems are "the best of their kind in the English language."
+     But her letters need cause no such alarums and excursions.
+     If they are sometimes what is called by youth "Early
+     Victorian"--"Early Anything," and "Middle Anything" and
+     "Late Anything," are sure to be found sooner or later by all
+     wise persons to have their own place in life and history.
+     And sentimentalism has, in private prose, an infinitely less
+     provocative character than when it is displayed in published
+     verse. A distinguished Scotch philosopher of the last
+     generation laid it down that, in literature, for
+     demonstrative exhibitions of affection and sorrow "the
+     occasion should be adequate, and the actuality rare." But
+     letter-writing, though it can be eminently literary, is
+     always literature with a certain license attached to it:
+     arising from the fact that it was not--or ought not to have
+     been--intended for publication. And that naturalness of
+     which so much has been said is displayed constantly and by
+     no means disagreeably in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
+     epistles. In fact, you cannot help liking her the better for
+     them--which in one way at least is the supreme test. The
+     following, written soon after her marriage--an elopement of
+     a kind, but certainly justifiable if ever one was--is a very
+     pleasant specimen in more ways than one, as regards taste,
+     temper, and descriptive powers. It also contains no
+     criticism, which in her case was apt to be extremely
+     uncertain.
+
+
+43. TO MRS. MARTIN
+
+(PISA) November 5, (1846)
+
+It was pleasant to me, my dearest friend, to think while I was reading
+your letter yesterday, that almost by that time you had received mine,
+and could not even seem to doubt a moment longer whether I admitted your
+claim of hearing and of speaking to the uttermost. I recognised you too
+entirely as my friend. Because you had put faith in me, so much the more
+reason there was that I should justify it as far as I could, and with as
+much frankness (which was a part of my gratitude to you) as was possible
+from a woman to a woman. Always I have felt that you have believed in me
+and loved me, and, for the sake of the past and of the present, your
+affection and your esteem are more to me than I could afford to lose,
+even in these changed and happy circumstances. So I thank you once more,
+my dear kind friends, I thank you both--I never shall forget your
+goodness. I feel it, of course, the more deeply, in proportion to the
+painful disappointment in other quarters.... Am I bitter? The feeling,
+however, passes while I write it out, and my own affection for everybody
+will wait patiently to be 'forgiven' in the proper form, when everybody
+shall be at leisure properly. Assuredly, in the meanwhile, however, my
+case is not to be classed with other cases--what happened to me could
+not have happened, perhaps, with any other family in England.... I hate
+and loathe everything too which is clandestine--we _both_ do, Robert and
+I; and the manner the whole business was carried on in might have
+instructed the least acute of the bystanders. The flowers standing
+perpetually on my table for the last two years were brought there by one
+hand, as everybody knew; and really it would have argued an excess of
+benevolence in an unmarried man with quite enough resources in London,
+to pay the continued visits he paid to me without some strong motive
+indeed. Was it his fault that he did not associate with everybody in the
+house as well as with me? He desired it; but no--that was not to be. The
+endurance of the pain of the position was not the least proof of his
+attachment to me. How I thank you for believing in him--how grateful it
+makes me! He will justify to the uttermost that faith. We have been
+married two months, and every hour has bound me to him more and more; if
+the beginning was well, still better it is now--that is what he says to
+me, and I say back again day by day. Then it is an 'advantage' to have
+an inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of all things in heaven and
+earth, and shows besides as perpetual a good humour and gaiety as if he
+were--a fool, shall I say? or a considerable quantity more, perhaps. As
+to our domestic affairs, it is not to _my_ honour and glory that the
+'bills' are made up every week and paid more regularly 'than bard
+beseems,' while dear Mrs. Jameson laughs outright at our miraculous
+prudence and economy, and declares that it is past belief and precedent
+that we should not burn the candles at both ends, and the next moment
+will have it that we remind her of the children in a poem of Heine's who
+set up housekeeping in a tub, and inquired gravely the price of coffee.
+Ah, but she has left Pisa at last--left it yesterday. It was a painful
+parting to everybody. Seven weeks spent in such close neighbourhood--a
+month of it under the same roof and in the same carriages--will fasten
+people together, and then travelling _shakes_ them together. A more
+affectionate, generous woman never lived than Mrs. Jameson[123] and it
+is pleasant to be sure that she loves us both from her heart, and not
+only _du bout des lèvres_. Think of her making Robert promise (as he has
+told me since) that in the case of my being unwell he would write to her
+instantly, and she would come at once if anywhere in Italy. So kind, so
+like her. She spends the winter in Rome, but an intermediate, month at
+Florence, and we are to keep tryst with her somewhere in the spring,
+perhaps at Venice. If not, she says that she will come back here, for
+that certainly she will see us. She would have stayed altogether
+perhaps, if it had not been for her book upon art which she is engaged
+to bring out next year, and the materials for which are to be _sought_.
+As to Pisa, she liked it just as we like it. Oh, it is so beautiful and
+so full of repose, yet not _desolate_: it is rather the repose of sleep
+than of death. Then after the first ten days of rain, which seemed to
+refer us fatally to Alfieri's 'piove e ripiove' came as perpetual a
+divine sunshine, such cloudless, exquisite weather that we ask whether
+it may not be June instead of November. Every day I am out walking while
+the golden oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired Robert
+and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards. We have been to your
+seashore, too, and seen your island, only he insists on it (Robert does)
+that it is not Corsica but Gorgona, and that Corsica is not in sight.
+_Beautiful_ and blue the island was, however, in any case. It might have
+been Romero's instead of either. Also we have driven up to the foot of
+the mountains, and seen them reflected down in the little pure lake of
+Ascuno, and we have seen the pine woods, and met the camels laden with
+faggots all in a line. So now ask me again if I enjoy my liberty as you
+expect. My head goes round sometimes, that is all. I never was happy
+before in my life. Ah, but, of course, the painful thoughts recur! There
+are some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their displeasure, or
+even under their injustice. Only it seems to me that with time and
+patience my poor dearest papa will be melted into opening his arms to
+us--will be melted into a clear understanding of motives and intentions;
+I cannot believe that he will forget me, as he says he will, and go on
+thinking me to be dead rather than alive and happy. So I manage to hope
+for the best, and all that remains, all my life here, _is_ best already,
+could not be better or happier. And willingly tell dear Mr. Martin I
+would take him and you for witnesses of it, and in the meanwhile he is
+not to send me tantalising messages; no, indeed, unless you really,
+really, should let yourselves be wafted our way, and could you do so
+much better at Pau? particularly if Fanny Hanford should come here. Will
+she really? The climate is described by the inhabitants as a 'pleasant
+spring throughout the winter,' and if you were to see Robert and me
+threading our path along the shady side everywhere to avoid the
+'excessive heat of the sun' in this November (?) it would appear a good
+beginning. We are not in the warm orthodox position by the Arno because
+we heard with our ears one of the best physicians of the place advise
+against it. 'Better,' he said, 'to have cool rooms to live in and warm
+walks to go out along.' The rooms we have are rather over-cool perhaps;
+we are obliged to have a little fire in the sitting-room, in the
+mornings and evenings that is; but I do not fear for the winter, there
+is too much difference to my feelings between this November and any
+English November I ever knew. We have our dinner from the Trattoria at
+two o'clock, and can dine our favourite way on thrushes and Chianti with
+a miraculous cheapness, and no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet
+Elijah or the lilies of the field took as little thought for their
+dining, which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which we
+never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee, and rolls of milk,
+made of milk, I mean, and at nine our supper (call it supper, if you
+please) of roast chestnuts and grapes. So you see how primitive we are,
+and how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast. The worst of Pisa is,
+or would be to some persons, that, socially speaking, it has its
+dullnesses; it is not lively like Florence, not in that way. But we do
+not want society, we shun it rather. We like the Duomo and the Campo
+Santo instead. Then we know a little of Professor Ferucci, who gives us
+access to the University library, and we subscribe to a modern one, and
+we have plenty of writing to do of our own. If we can do anything for
+Fanny Hanford, let us know. It would be too happy, I suppose, to have to
+do it for yourselves. Think, however, I am quite well, quite well. I can
+thank God, too, for being alive and well. Make dear Mr. Martin keep
+well, and not forget himself in the Herefordshire cold--draw him into
+the sun somewhere. Now write and tell me everything of your plans and of
+you both, dearest friends. My husband bids me say that he desires to
+have my friends for his own friends, and that he is grateful to you for
+not crossing that feeling. Let him send his regards to you. And let me
+be throughout all changes,
+
+Your ever faithful and most affectionate,
+
+BA.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[123] Anna Jameson (1794-1860) was a woman of letters and an art-critic
+at one time of immense influence through her illustrated books on
+"Sacred and Legendary" (as well as some other) "Art." But, as somehow or
+other happens not infrequently, the objects of her "affection and
+generosity" did not include her husband.
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)
+
+
+     Not much need be added to what was said in the Introduction
+     about this famous translator and almost equally, though less
+     uniquely, remarkable letter-writer. His life was entirely
+     uneventful and his friendships have been already
+     commemorated. The version of Omar Khayyàm appeared in 1859;
+     was an utter "drug"--remainder copies going at a few
+     pence--for a time; but became one of the most admired books
+     of the English nineteenth century before very long. Some of
+     his _Letters_ were published at various times from 1889 to
+     1901 (those to Fanny Kemble in 1895). It is not perhaps
+     merely fanciful to suggest that the "uniqueness" above
+     glanced at does supply a sort of connection between the
+     _Letters_ and the _Works_. The faculty of at once retaining
+     the matter of a subject and transforming it in treatment has
+     perhaps never, as regards translation, been exhibited in
+     such transcendence as in the English _Rubaiyàt_. But
+     something of this same faculty must belong to every good
+     letter-writer--and a good deal of it certainly is shown by
+     FitzGerald in _his_ letters. Indeed one of the processes of
+     letter-and memoir-study (the memoir as has been said is
+     practically an "open" letter) is that of comparing the
+     treatments of the same subject by different persons--say of
+     the Great Fire by Pepys and Evelyn, of the Riots of '80 by
+     Walpole and Johnson. He himself, as will be seen, calls the
+     letter given below "not very interesting." It seems to me
+     very interesting indeed: and likely to be increasingly so as
+     time goes on. Few things could be more characteristic of the
+     writer than his way of "visiting his sister" by living alone
+     in lodgings all _day_ for a month. The "_old_
+     age"--forty-five--is hardly less so. The allusions to
+     "Alfred" (Tennyson); "old" Thackeray, for whom he constantly
+     keeps the affectionate school and college use of the
+     adjective; Landor[124] (who unluckily did _not_ die at Bath
+     though he might have done so but for one of the last and
+     least creditable of his eccentricities); Beckford ("Old
+     Vathek"), and a fourth "old," Rogers (who was one of
+     FitzGerald's aversions); Oxford (as yet almost unstained by
+     any modernities spiritual or material); and Bath[125] (to
+     remain still longer a "haunt of ancient peace")--are
+     precious. The fifth "old," Spedding, who devoted chiefly to
+     Bacon talents worthy of more varied exercise, was one of the
+     innermost Tennyson set, as was "Harry" Lushington, who died
+     very soon after this letter was written. "Your Book" is F.
+     Tennyson's _Days and Hours_, a volume of poetry while
+     reading which probably many people have wondered in what
+     respect it came short of really great poetry, though they
+     felt it did so.
+
+
+44. TO FREDERIC TENNYSON
+
+BATH May 7/54.
+
+My dear Frederic,
+
+You see to what fashionable places I am reduced in my old Age. The truth
+is however I am come here by way of Visit to a sister I have scarce seen
+these six years; my visit consisting in this that I live alone in a
+lodging of my own by day, and spend two or three hours with her in the
+Evening. This has been my way of Life for three weeks, and will be so
+for some ten days more: after which I talk of flying back to more native
+counties. I was to have gone on to see Alfred in his "Island Home" from
+here: but it appears he goes to London about the same time I quit this
+place: so I must and shall defer my Visit to him. Perhaps I shall catch
+a sight of him in London; as also of old Thackeray who, Donne writes me
+word, came suddenly on him in Pall Mall the other day: while all the
+while people supposed _The Newcomes_ were being indited at Rome or
+Naples.
+
+If ever you live in England you must live here at Bath. It really is a
+splendid City in a lovely, even a noble, Country. Did you ever see it?
+One beautiful feature in the place is the quantity of Garden and Orchard
+it is all through embroidered with. Then the Streets, when you go into
+them, are as handsome and gay as London, gayer and handsomer because
+cleaner and in a clearer Atmosphere; and if you want the Country you get
+into it (and a very fine Country) on all sides and directly. Then there
+is such Choice of Houses, Cheap as well as Dear, of all sizes, with good
+Markets, Railways etc. I am not sure I shall not come here for part of
+the Winter. It is a place you would like, I am sure: though I do not say
+but you are better in Florence. Then on the top of the hill is old
+Vathek's Tower, which he used to sit and read in daily, and from which
+he could see his own Fonthill, while it stood. Old Landor quoted to me
+'Nullus in orbe locus, etc.,' apropos of Bath: he, you may know, has
+lived here for years, and I should think would die here, though not yet.
+He seems so strong that he may rival old Rogers; of whom indeed one
+Newspaper gave what is called an 'Alarming Report of Mr. Rogers' Health'
+the other day, but another contradicted it directly and indignantly,
+and declared the Venerable Poet never was better. Landor has some
+hundred and fifty Pictures; each of which he thinks the finest specimen
+of the finest Master, and has a long story about, how he got it, when,
+etc. I dare say some are very good: but also some very bad. He appeared
+to me to judge of them as he does of Books and Men; with a most
+uncompromising perversity which the Phrenologists must explain to us
+after his Death.
+
+By the bye, about your Book, which of course you wish me to say
+something about. Parker sent me down a copy 'from the Author' for which
+I hereby thank you. If you believe my word, you already know my
+Estimation of so much that is in it: you have already guessed that I
+should have made a different selection from the great Volume which is
+now in Tatters. As I differ in Taste from the world, however, quite as
+much as from you, I do not know but you have done very much better in
+choosing as you have; the few people I have seen are very much pleased
+with it, the Cowells at Oxford delighted. A Bookseller there sold all
+his Copies the first day they came down: and even in Bath a Bookseller
+(and not one of the Principal) told me a fortnight ago he had sold some
+twenty copies. I have not been in Town since it came out: and have now
+so little correspondence with literati I can't tell you about them.
+There was a very unfair Review in the _Athenaeum_; which is the only
+Literary Paper I see: but I am told there are laudatory ones in
+_Examiner_ and _Spectator_.
+
+I was five weeks at Oxford, visiting the Cowells in just the same way
+that I am visiting my Sister here. I also liked Oxford greatly: but not
+so well I think as Bath: which is so large and busy that one is drowned
+in it as much as in London. There are often concerts, etc., for those
+who like them; I only go to a shilling affair that comes off every
+Saturday at what they call the Pump Room. On these occasions there is
+sometimes some Good Music if not excellently played. Last Saturday I
+heard a fine Trio of Beethoven. Mendelssohn's things are mostly tiresome
+to me. I have brought my old Handel Book here and recreate myself now
+and then with pounding one of the old Giant's Overtures on my sister's
+Piano, as I used to do on that Spinnet at my Cottage. As to Operas, and
+Exeter Halls, I have almost done with them: they give me no pleasure, I
+scarce know why.
+
+I suppose there is no chance of your being over in England this year,
+and perhaps as little Chance of my being in Italy. All I can say is, the
+latter is not impossible, which I suppose I may equally say of the
+former. But pray write me. You can always direct to me at Donne's, 12,
+St. James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either
+way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear
+how you and yours are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some
+inundation of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and
+whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends. I saw old
+Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he
+dearly loved and whose deathbed at Hastings he had just been waiting
+upon. Harry Lushington wrote a martial Ode on seeing the Guards march
+over Waterloo Bridge towards the East: I did not see it, but it was much
+admired and handed about, I believe. And now my paper is out: and I am
+going through the rain (it is said to rain very much here) to my
+Sister's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg you, in reply to this
+long if not very interesting letter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[124] "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men"
+are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own
+on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so
+childish as Landor, had much in common.
+
+[125] The curious eulogy--preferring it to Oxford as being "large and
+busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London--is also very
+characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country _and_ in a
+large town--hardly in a small one.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)
+
+
+     To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady
+     little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived
+     from _Further Records_ (London, 1890), were written rather
+     late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly
+     coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126]
+     and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story
+     leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know
+     the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a
+     haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of
+     grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the
+     "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the
+     subject that the present writer, in a long and wide
+     experience, has come across.
+
+
+45. TO H---- [EXTRACT]
+
+YORK FARM, BRANCHTOWN,
+PHILADELPHIA, Monday May 18th, 1874.
+
+One evening that my maid was sitting in the room from which she could
+see the whole of the staircase and upper landing, she saw the door of my
+bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown, with a
+bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand come out, walk the whole
+length of the passage, and return again into the bedroom, shutting the
+door after her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room below in my
+usual black velvet evening dress; moreover, the person she had seen bore
+no resemblance either in figure or face to me, or to any member of my
+household, which consisted of three young servant women besides herself,
+and a negro man-servant. My maid was a remarkably courageous and
+reasonable person, and, though very much startled (for she went directly
+upstairs and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and
+mentioned the circumstance to nobody, though, as she told me afterwards,
+she was so afraid lest I should have a similar visitation, that she was
+strongly tempted to ask Dr. W----'s advice as to the propriety of
+mentioning her experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however,
+and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the same room,
+the man-servant came in to light the gas and made her start, observing
+which, he said, "Why, lors, Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a
+ghost." In spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied,
+"Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You don't believe in
+such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well," he said, "I don't know just so
+sure what to say to that, seeing it's very well known there was a ghost
+in this house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well, poor Mrs.
+R----'s ghost, it's very well known, walks about this house, and no
+great wonder either, seeing how miserably she lived and died here." To
+Ellen's persistent expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on,
+"Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (_i.e._
+maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it"; and there the
+conversation ended. Some days after this, Ellen coming into the
+drawing-room to speak to me, stopped abruptly at the door, and stood
+there, having suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to
+it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house, the face of
+the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy
+ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I
+have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such
+intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any assignable reason
+whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to
+the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest
+variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my
+explanation of it; that she had heard, without paying any particular
+attention to it, some talk among the other servants about the ghost in
+the house, which had remained unconsciously to her in her memory, and
+reproduced itself in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.
+
+
+46. To H---- [EXTRACT]
+
+YORK FARM, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.
+
+My dearest H----,
+
+It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest in the sort of
+literary feat which I consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to
+be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier--all
+Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars--and this absurd
+theory about Bacon, which was first broached a good many years ago,
+never obtained credit for a moment with them; nor did they ever
+entertain for an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William
+Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by him. Now I am
+intimately acquainted and in frequent communication with William Donne,
+Edward FitzGerald, and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare
+scholars, and the latter a man who has just published a work upon Bacon,
+which has been really the labour of his life; none of these men,
+competent judges of the matter, ever mentions the question of "Who wrote
+Shakespeare?" except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think
+they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so.
+
+I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made thus on the
+personality of my greatest mental benefactor; and consider the whole
+thing a misapplication, not to say waste, of time and ingenuity that
+might be better employed. As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with
+love, veneration, and gratitude, and am proud and happy to be his
+countrywoman, considering it among the privileges of my English birth, I
+resent the endeavour to prove that he deserved none of these feelings,
+but was a mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any interest
+for you, for I should not have supposed you imagined Shakespeare had not
+written his own plays, Irish though you be. Do you remember the
+servant's joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the cook
+asks, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the others answers, with, at
+any rate, partial plausibility, "Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[126] Sometimes one thinks her the wisest woman who ever lived. "Nothing
+seems stranger than the delusions of other people _when they have ceased
+to be our own_" suggests La Rochefoucauld and comes near to Solomon; but
+whosoever may have anticipated or prompted her, he is not at the moment
+within my memory. But she is often not wise at all: and even her good
+wits are not always left unaffected by her bad temper. It is really
+amusing to read Mrs. Carlyle's rather mischievous account of Mrs. Butler
+(F. K.'s married name) calling and carrying a whip "to keep her hand
+in": and _then_ to come on F. K.'s waspish resentment at these words,
+when they were published.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
+(1811-1863)
+
+
+     So much has been said of Thackeray's letter-writing powers
+     in the Introduction that not much need be added here on the
+     general side. But a few words may be allowed on what we may
+     call the _conditioning_ circumstances which affected these
+     powers, and made the result so peculiar. Except in Swift's
+     case--a thing piquant in itself considering the injustice of
+     the later writer to the earlier--hardly any body of letters
+     exhibits these conditions so obviously and in so varied a
+     fashion. In both there was the utmost intellectual satire
+     combined with the utmost tenderness of feeling. Thackeray of
+     course, partly from nature and partly from the influence of
+     time, did not mask his tenderness and double-edge his
+     severity with roughness and coarseness. But the combination
+     was intrinsically not very different. There has also to be
+     taken into account in Thackeray's case domestic
+     sorrow--coming quickly and life-long after it began; means
+     long restricted (partly by his own folly but not so more
+     tolerable); recognition of genius almost as long deferred;
+     and yet other "maladies of the soul." The result was a
+     constant ferment, of which the letters are in a way the
+     relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently
+     light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when a man
+     habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes
+     lighter--till there is nothing of it left.
+
+     He is, however, not easy to "sample," there being, as has
+     been said, no authorised collection to draw upon and other
+     difficulties in the way. What follows may serve for fault
+     of a better: and the _Spectator_ letter-pastiche referred to
+     above under Walpole, will complete it perhaps more
+     appropriately than may at first appear. For while the latter
+     is quite Addisonian, not merely in dress but in body, its
+     soul is blended of two natures--the model's and the
+     artist's--in the rather uncanny fashion which makes _Esmond_
+     as a whole so marvellous, except to those stalwarts who hold
+     that, as nobody before the twentieth century knew anything
+     about anything, Thackeray could not know about the
+     eighteenth.
+
+
+47. TO MISS LUCY BAXTER
+
+WASHINGTON, Saturday
+Feb. 19. 1853.
+
+My dear little kind Lucy:
+
+I began to write you a letter in the railroad yesterday, but it bumped
+with more than ordinary violence, and I was forced to give up the
+endeavour. I did not know how ill Lucy was at that time, only
+remembered that I owed her a letter for that pretty one you wrote me
+at Philadelphia, when Sarah was sick and you acted as her Secretary.
+Is there going to be always Somebody sick at the brown house? If I
+were to come there now, I wonder should I be allowed to come and see
+you in your night-cap--I wonder even do you wear a night-cap? I should
+step up, take your little hand, which I daresay is lying outside the
+coverlet, give it a little shake; and then sit down and talk all sorts
+of stuff and nonsense to you for half an hour; but very kind and
+gentle, not so as to make you laugh too much or your little back ache
+any more. Did I not tell you to leave off that beecely jimnayshum? I
+am always giving fine advice to girls in brown houses, and they
+always keep on never minding. It is not difficult to write lying in
+bed--this is written not in bed, but on a sofa. If you write the
+upright hand it's quite easy; slanting-dicular is not so pleasant,
+though. I have just come back from Baltimore and find your mother's
+and sister's melancholy letters. I thought to myself, perhaps I might
+see them on this very sofa and pictured to myself their 2 kind faces.
+Mr. Crampton was going to ask them to dinner, I had made arrangements
+to get Sarah nice partners at the ball--Why did dear little Lucy
+tumble down at the Gymnasium? Many a pretty plan in life tumbles down
+so, Miss Lucy, and falls on its back. But the good of being ill is to
+find how kind one's friends are; of being at a pinch (I do not know
+whether I may use the expression--whether "pinch" is an indelicate
+word in this country; it is used by our old writers to signify
+poverty, narrow circumstances, res angusta)--the good of being poor, I
+say, is to find friends to help you, I have been both ill and poor,
+and found, thank God, such consolation in those evils; and I daresay
+at this moment, now you are laid up, you are the person of the most
+importance in the whole house--Sarah is sliding about the room with
+cordials in her hands and eyes; Libby is sitting quite disconsolate by
+the bed (poor Libby! when one little bird fell off the perch, I wonder
+the other did not go up and fall off, too!) the expression of sympathy
+in Ben's eyes is perfectly heart-rending; even George is quiet; and
+your Father, Mother and Uncle (all 3 so notorious for their violence
+of temper and language) have actually forgotten to scold. "Ach, du
+lieber Himmel," says Herr Strumpf--isn't his name Herr Strumpf?--the
+German master, "die schöne Fräulein ist krank!" and bursts into tears
+on the Pianofortyfier's shoulder when they hear the news (through his
+sobs) from black John. We have an Ebony femme de chambre here; when I
+came from Baltimore just now I found her in the following costume and
+attitude standing for her picture to Mr. Crowe. She makes the beds
+with that pipe in her mouf and leaves it about in the rooms. Wouldn't
+she have been a nice lady's-maid for your mother and Miss Bally
+Saxter?
+
+But even if Miss Lucy had not had her fall, I daresay there would have
+been no party. Here is a great snow-storm falling, though yesterday
+was as bland and bright as May (English May, I mean) and how could we
+have lionized Baltimore, and gone to Mount Vernon, and taken our
+diversion in the snow? There would have been nothing for it but to
+stay in this little closet of a room, where there is scarce room for 6
+people, and where it is not near so comfortable as the brown house.
+Dear old b.h., shall I see it again soon? I shall not go farther than
+Charleston, and Savannah probably, and then I hope I shall get another
+look at you all again before I commence farther wanderings--O, stop! I
+didn't tell you why I was going to write you--well, I went on Thursday
+to dine with Governor and Mrs. Fish, a dinner in honor of me--and
+before I went I arrayed myself in a certain white garment of which the
+collar-button-holes had been altered, and I thought of the kind,
+friendly little hand that had done that deed for me; and when the
+Fisheses told me how they lived in the Second Avenue (I had forgotten
+all about 'em)--their house and the house opposite came back to my
+mind, and I liked them 50 times better for living near some friends of
+mine. She is a nice woman, Madam Fish, besides; and didn't I abuse you
+all to her? Good bye, dear little Lucy--I wish the paper wasn't full.
+But I have been sitting half an hour by the poor young lady's sofa,
+and talking stuff and nonsense, haven't I? And now I get up, and shake
+your hand with a God bless you! and walk down stairs, and please to
+give everybody my kindest regards, and remember that I am truly your
+friend.
+
+W. M. T.
+
+
+48.
+
+THE "TRUMPET" COFFEE-HOUSE,
+WHITEHALL.
+
+'Mr Spectator--
+
+'I am a gentleman but little acquainted with the town, though I have had
+a university education, and passed some years serving my country abroad,
+where my name is better known than in the coffee-houses and St. James's.
+
+'Two years since my uncle died, leaving me a pretty estate in the county
+of Kent; and being at Tunbridge Wells last summer, after my mourning was
+over, and on the look-out, if truth must be told, for some young lady
+who would share with me the solitude of my great Kentish house, and be
+kind to my tenantry (for whom a woman can do a great deal more good than
+the best-intentioned man can), I was greatly fascinated by a young lady
+of London, who was the toast of all the company at the Wells. Everyone
+knows Saccharissa's beauty; and I think, Mr. Spectator, no one better
+than herself.
+
+'My table-book informs me that I danced no less than seven-and-twenty
+sets with her at the assembly. I treated her to the fiddles twice. I was
+admitted on several days to her lodging, and received by her with a
+great deal of distinction, and, for a time, was entirely her slave. It
+was only when I found, from common talk of the company at the Wells, and
+from narrowly watching one, who I once thought of asking the most
+sacred question a man can put to a woman, that I became aware how unfit
+she was to be a country gentleman's wife; and that this fair creature
+was but a heartless worldly jilt, playing with affections that she never
+meant to return, and, indeed, incapable of returning them. 'Tis
+admiration such women want, not love that touches them; and I can
+conceive, in her old age, no more wretched creature than this lady will
+be, when her beauty hath deserted her, when her admirers have left her,
+and she hath neither friendship nor religion to console her.
+
+'Business calling me to London, I went to St. James's Church last
+Sunday, and there opposite me sat my beauty of the Wells. Her behaviour
+during the whole service was so pert, languishing and absurd; she
+flirted her fan, and ogled and eyed me in a manner so indecent, that I
+was obliged to shut my eyes, so as actually not to see her, and whenever
+I opened them beheld hers (and very bright they are) still staring at
+me. I fell in with her afterwards at Court, and at the playhouse; and
+here nothing would satisfy her but she must elbow through the crowd and
+speak to me, and invite me to the assembly, which she holds at her
+house, nor very far from Ch--r--ng Cr--ss.
+
+'Having made her a promise to attend, of course I kept my promise; and
+found the young widow in the midst of a half-dozen of card-tables, and a
+crowd of wits and admirers. I made the best bow I could, and advanced
+towards her; and saw by a peculiar puzzled look in her face, though she
+tried to hide her perplexity, that she had forgotten even my name.
+
+'Her talk, artful as it was, convinced me that I had guessed aright. She
+turned the conversation most ridiculously upon the spelling of names and
+words; and I replied with as ridiculous, fulsome compliments as I could
+pay her; indeed, one in which I compared her to an angel visiting the
+sick-wells, went a little too far; nor should I have employed it, but
+that the allusion came from the Second Lesson last Sunday, which we both
+had heard, and I was pressed to answer her.
+
+'Then she came to the question, which I knew was awaiting me, and asked
+how I _spelt_ my name? "Madam," says I, turning on my heel, "I spell it
+with the y." And so I left her, wondering at the light-heartedness of
+the town-people, who forget and make friends so easily, and resolved to
+look elsewhere for a partner for your constant reader.
+
+'CYMON WYLDOATS.
+
+'You know my real name, Mr. Spectator, in which there is no such a
+letter as _hupsilon_. But if the lady, whom I have called Saccharissa,
+wonders that I appear no more at the tea-tables, she is hereby
+respectfully informed the reason y.'
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
+
+
+     There are few better examples by converse of the saying
+     (familiar in various forms and sometimes specially applied
+     to writing and answering letters) that it is only idle
+     people who have no time to do anything, than Dickens. He was
+     by no means long-lived: and for the last
+     three-fifths--practically the whole busy time--of his life,
+     he was one of the busiest of men. He wrote many universally
+     known books, and not a few, in some cases not so well known,
+     articles. He travelled a great deal; edited periodicals for
+     many years, taking that duty by no means in the spirit of
+     Olympian aloofness which some popular opinion connects with
+     editorship; only sometimes shirked society; and had all
+     sorts of miscellaneous occupations and avocations. His very
+     fancy for long walks might seem one of the least compatible
+     with letter-writing; yet a very large bulk of his letters
+     (by no means mainly composed of editorial ones) has been
+     published, and there are no doubt many unpublished. There
+     have been different opinions as to their comparative rank as
+     letters, but there can be no difference as to the curious
+     full-bloodedness and plenitude of life which, in this as in
+     all other divisions of his writing, characterises Dickens's
+     expression of his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps, as might
+     be generally though not universally expected, the comic ones
+     are the more delightful: at any rate they seem best worth
+     giving here. The first--to a schoolboy who had written to
+     him about _Nicholas Nickleby_--is quite charming; the
+     second, to the famous actor-manager who after being a
+     Londoner by birth and residence for half a century had just
+     retired, is almost Charles Lamb-like; and the third
+     deserved to have been put in the original mouth of Mrs.
+     Gamp![127]
+
+
+49. TO MASTER HASTINGS HUGHES
+
+DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON.
+Dec. 12th. 1838.
+
+Respected Sir,
+
+I have given Squeers one cut on the neck and two on the head, at which
+he appeared much surprised and began to cry, which, being a cowardly
+thing, is just what I should have expected from him--wouldn't you?
+
+I have carefully done what you told me in your letter about the lamb and
+the two "sheeps" for the little boys. They have also had some good ale
+and porter, and some wine. I am sorry you didn't say _what_ wine you
+would like them to have. I gave them some sherry, which they liked very
+much, except one boy, who was a little sick and choked a good deal. He
+was rather greedy, and that's the truth, and I believe it went the wrong
+way, which I say served him right, and I hope you will say so too.
+
+Nicholas had his roast lamb, as you said he was to, but he could not eat
+it all, and says if you do not mind his doing so he should like to have
+the rest hashed to-morrow with some greens, which he is very fond of,
+and so am I. He said he did not like to have his porter hot, for he
+thought it spoilt the flavour, so I let him have it cold. You should
+have seen him drink it. I thought he never would have left off. I also
+gave him three pounds of money, all in sixpences, to make it seem more,
+and he said directly that he should give more than half to his mamma and
+sister, and divide the rest with poor Smike. And I say he is a good
+fellow for saying so; and if anybody says he isn't I am ready to fight
+him whenever they like--there!
+
+Fanny Squeers shall be attended to, depend upon it. Your drawing of her
+is very like, except that I don't think the hair is quite curly enough.
+The nose is particularly like hers, and so are the legs. She is a nasty
+disagreeable thing, and I know it will make her very cross when she sees
+it; and what I say is that I hope it may. You will say the same I
+know--at least I think you will.
+
+I meant to have written you a long letter, but I cannot write very fast
+when I like the person I am writing to, because that makes me think
+about them, and I like you, and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight
+o'clock at night, and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when
+it is my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not say
+anything more besides this--and that is my love to you and Neptune; and
+if you will drink my health every Christmas Day I will drink
+yours--come.
+
+I am,
+
+Respected Sir,
+
+Your affectionate Friend.
+
+P.S. I don't write my name very plain,[128] but you know what it is you
+know, so never mind.
+
+
+50. TO MR. W. C. MACREADY
+
+Saturday, May 24th, 1851.
+
+My dear Macready,
+
+We are getting in a good heap of money for the Guild. The comedy has
+been very much improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene
+to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in the play. And
+there _is_ a farce to be produced on Tuesday next, wherein a
+distinguished amateur will sustain a variety of assumption-parts, and in
+particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am
+pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from
+the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of
+darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague
+smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on
+Wednesday or Thursday.
+
+Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you
+think of us among the London fleas! But they tell me you are coming in
+for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town to
+attend to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in
+the streets. They will misdirect you for what the vulgar call "a lark,"
+meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into some
+respectable shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by his being
+dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his
+hat being made of sticking-plaster. You may perhaps see in some odd
+place an intelligent-looking man, with a curious little wooden table
+before him and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but don't
+do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where
+the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These,
+too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good
+acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy should be), I
+would recommend you to see ---- at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
+Anybody will show it to you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it
+by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are
+eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile,
+recollect. Porter is twopence per pint; what is called stout is
+fourpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the
+price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend
+you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street, Piccadilly,
+Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these will please you after a
+time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can
+serve you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your
+happy family, so remote from this Babel.
+
+Believe me, my dear Friend,
+
+Ever affectionately yours.
+
+[CHARLES DICKENS]
+
+P.S. I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you
+will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of
+_King Charles the First_.[129]
+
+
+51. TO MR. EDMUND YATES
+
+TAVISTOCK HOUSE,
+Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. 1858.
+
+My dear Yates,
+
+Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text _is not_ "Which
+his 'owls was organs." When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to
+spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's
+exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the
+Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he never took his hands away from
+his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby." On
+encountering that spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution)
+"took with fits." For this distressing complaint he was medically
+treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid him on his back upon the
+airy stones"--please to observe what follows--"and she was told, to ease
+her mind, his 'owls was organs."
+
+That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first
+sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counterpane,
+and not yet "put comfortable," hears a noise apparently proceeding from
+the backyard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner: "What 'owls
+are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor,
+looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs.
+Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable
+presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?--no, no, no! What are we
+thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am,
+organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."
+
+Yours faithfully, [C. D.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[127] One of the pleasantest, _to me_, of Dickens's letters is that in
+which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor
+echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see _inf._ under Stevenson).
+But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.
+
+[128] Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by
+no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.
+
+[129] "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's _Not so Bad as we Seem_, acted by
+Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years
+ago, and about to be reproduced _in loco_ as these proofs are being
+revised.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)
+
+
+     There are some people who, while thinking that the author of
+     _Westward Ho!_ has not, at least recently, been given his
+     due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations
+     of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings
+     Kingsley was inaccurate,--almost (as his friend and
+     brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally
+     inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his
+     way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he
+     constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as
+     philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat
+     by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his
+     contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one
+     time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more
+     educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least
+     unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.
+
+     But none of his foibles--not even corn-treading--is a fatal
+     defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good
+     chance here, and his _Letters and Memoirs_ have been
+     deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot
+     show in full the really exceptional versatility which
+     enabled the same man to write _Yeast_ and _Westward Ho!_,
+     _Andromeda_ and _The Water Babies_, the best of the Essays
+     and the best of the Sermons, _Alton Locke_ and _At Last_.
+     But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them
+     the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed
+     in one respect--as a writer--Kingsley is perhaps better in
+     his letters than in his _Essays_, where he too often affects
+     a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.
+     The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied
+     character--as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman,
+     and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of
+     praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him--"the
+     most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to
+     praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all
+     thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most
+     incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support
+     ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that
+     Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men
+     of letters I know nothing so rare as this."
+
+     It is true that the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ was
+     an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other
+     things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous
+     to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman
+     were almost fresh, he writes that he has read _The Dream of
+     Gerontius_ "with admiration and awe." [Greek: thymos], in
+     this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on
+     the other side we get, through him of _As You Like It_, an
+     explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a
+     cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once
+     saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow,
+     did it sulkily.
+
+
+52. TO TOM HUGHES, ESQ.
+
+Jan. 12. 1857.
+
+I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have
+puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that
+good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from
+every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his
+cock-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call
+it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest
+book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some
+very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should
+have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment
+frankly. Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a
+book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?
+So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the
+times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they
+are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's
+right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of
+themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company,
+I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint.
+Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I have
+good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class below. They are
+effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George
+Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than
+in fancying that by keeping down manly [Greek: thymos], which Plato
+saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They
+were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and
+'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after
+that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the
+poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier
+and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy.
+Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow
+his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other
+day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of ----, who
+cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when
+he saw the melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and would
+try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried
+it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even
+his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at
+Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run
+I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as
+good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over
+Hazeley Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and a
+streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time
+fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight,
+and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank
+broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd
+time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if you can get a
+horse through that clay vale, why then you can get him 'mostwards';
+leastwise so I find, for a black region it is, and if you ain't in the
+same field with the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same
+parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all supernumerary
+vegetations. Actually I was pounded in a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the
+amount of green stuff in these parts. Come and see me, and take the old
+mare out, and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)
+
+
+     The peculiar wilfulness--the unkind called it
+     wrong-headedness--which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's
+     genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire
+     indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of
+     displaying itself in all his work, public as well as
+     private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself
+     nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he
+     often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he
+     chosen, might as well have taken another--while he might
+     have chosen this in some which do not actually _call_
+     themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference,
+     except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the
+     classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume
+     of _Modern Painters_ to _Verona_ in time, or from _The Seven
+     Lamps of Architecture_ to _Unto This Last_ in subject. If
+     anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he
+     could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But
+     this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which
+     accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for
+     letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets
+     the benefit of both very often--of a curious study of high
+     character and great powers uncontrolled by logical
+     self-criticism almost always. The following--part of a still
+     longer letter which he addressed to the _Daily Telegraph_,
+     Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question--was of
+     course written for publication, but so, practically, was
+     everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too
+     that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand
+     and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous
+     crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally
+     to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but
+     much of his nobler idealism, while it is a capital example
+     of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam"
+     are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom,
+     tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought
+     a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity
+     enough"--the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper
+     had printed, _hoc_ instead of _hac_. "A book of Scripture,"
+     Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a
+     baby-farmer of the day.
+
+
+53. From "THE DAILY TELEGRAPH"
+
+September 18, 1865.
+
+DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY.
+
+To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."
+
+Sir,
+
+I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with
+much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when
+you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own
+experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I
+have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse,
+understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me
+gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your
+admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more
+willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published
+there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint
+worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful
+or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no
+part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families.
+The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better
+class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio,
+or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will
+hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from
+Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but
+his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to
+Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway
+went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use
+writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And,
+indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The
+cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is
+the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but
+vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no
+sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague
+spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth,
+that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a
+putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this
+galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that
+little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you
+say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no
+seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is
+his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him.
+That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.
+
+The relation of master and servant involves every other--touches every
+condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you
+put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not
+primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you
+have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good.
+You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic,
+have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have
+accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of
+being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by
+a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the
+letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the
+inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the
+general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of
+sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise
+treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody
+shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book
+of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects
+Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not
+one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to
+Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary
+position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their
+school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them:
+for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been
+written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his
+domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education
+would sometimes start to be reminded that his "_noctes coenaeque Deum!_"
+meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow
+me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your
+correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader
+in the _Art-Journal_ for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a
+little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted
+in the last paper of the _Idler_?
+
+     "I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched
+     in poverty; and beloved by the gods."
+
+     "Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body,
+     has now found deliverance for that also."
+
+How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last
+legend, and write--
+
+     "This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has
+     now found captivity for that also."
+
+I will not pass without notice--for it bears also on wide
+interests--your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from
+the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the
+economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science
+which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply,
+but determines what _ought_ to be demanded and what _can_ be supplied. A
+child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to
+the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your
+purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of
+the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into
+its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from
+its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign
+beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be
+all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political
+economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to
+be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final
+demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by
+the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this
+day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep
+his pigs out of sight of the lake.
+
+Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of
+servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want
+Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for
+money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own
+scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another
+woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of
+servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself--for
+the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only
+shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be
+knights among us, who will need squires--captains among us, needing
+crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate?
+Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill?
+Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to
+serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little
+thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It
+_might_ come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but
+if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they
+_are_ so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more
+useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and
+organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will
+be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let
+the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to
+stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the
+pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost
+in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the
+Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its
+shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if
+reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again,
+instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON
+(1850-1894)
+
+
+     The author of _Treasure Island_ (invariably known to his
+     friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved in
+     the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable
+     cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew
+     Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that
+     of our Matthew on Shelley. For a short time some of these
+     friends--not perhaps the wisest of them--were inclined to
+     regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer
+     of criticisms and miscellaneous articles--a sort of new
+     Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the _New Arabian Nights_ than
+     they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen for
+     a long time--such as, in respect of anything imitable, had
+     never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in with
+     these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure Romance,
+     and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar. On the other
+     hand his letters are almost as good as his fiction, and not
+     in the least open to the charges of a certain
+     non-naturalness of style--even of thought--which could,
+     justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it
+     is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their
+     popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other
+     division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their
+     "touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the
+     blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference
+     to its context) need not be discussed.
+
+     As, by the kindness of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, I am enabled to
+     give here an unpublished letter of Stevenson's to myself, it
+     may require some explanation, not only of the commentatory
+     and commendatory kind but of fact. Stevenson, coming to dine
+     with me, had brought with him, and showed with much pride, a
+     new umbrella (a seven-and-sixpenny one) which, to my
+     surprise, he had bought. But when he went away that night he
+     forgot it; and when I met him next day at the Savile and
+     suggested that I should send it to him, there or somewhere,
+     he said he was going abroad almost immediately and begged me
+     to keep it for him. By this or that accident, but chiefly
+     owing to his constant expatriations, no opportunity of
+     restitution ever occurred: though I used to remind him of it
+     as a standing joke, and treasured it religiously, stored and
+     unused. This letter is partly in answer to a last reminder
+     in which I said that I was going to present it to the
+     nation, that it might be kept with King Koffee Kalcalli's,
+     but as a memory of a "victor in romance" not of a vanquished
+     enemy.
+
+     I of course told Mr. Kipling of the contents which concerned
+     him: and he, equally of course, demanded delivery of the
+     goods at once. But, half in joke, I demurred, saying that I
+     was a bailee, and the gift was not formal enough, being
+     undated and only a "suggestion"; he should have it without
+     fail at my death, or Stevenson's.[130]
+
+     When alas! this latter came, I prepared to act up to my
+     promise; but, alas! again, the umbrella had vanished! Some
+     prated of mislaying in house-removal, of illicit use by
+     servants, etc.; but for my part I had and have no doubt that
+     the thing had been enskyed and constellated--like Ariadne's
+     Crown, Berenice's Locks, Cassiopeia's Chair, and a whole
+     galaxy of other now celestial objects--to afford a special
+     place to my dead friend then, and to my live one when (may
+     the time still be far distant) he is ready for it.
+
+     As for the more serious subject of the letter, I must refer
+     curious readers to an essay of mine on Lockhart, originally
+     published in 1884 and reprinted in _Essays in English
+     Literature_ some years later. To this reprint I subjoined,
+     _before_ I got this letter from R. L. S., a reasoned defence
+     of Lockhart from the charge of cowardice and "caddishness":
+     but it is evident that Stevenson had not yet seen it. When
+     he did see it, he wrote me another letter chiefly about my
+     book itself, and so of no interest to the public, but
+     touching again on this Lockhart question. He avowed himself
+     still dissatisfied: but said he was sorry for his original
+     remark which was "ungracious and unhandsome" if not untrue,
+     adding, "for to whom do I owe more pleasure than to
+     Lockhart?"
+
+
+54.
+
+My dear Saintsbury,
+
+Thanks for yours. Why did I call Lockhart a cad? That calls for an
+answer, and I give it. "Scorpion"[131] literature seems at the best no
+very fit employment for a man of genius, which Lockhart was--and none at
+all for a gentleman. But if a man goes in for such a trade, he must be
+ready for the consequences; and I do not conceive a gentleman as a
+coward; the white feather is not his crest, it _almost_ excludes--and I
+put the "almost" with reluctance. Well, now about the duel? Even
+Bel-Ami[132] turned up on the _terrain_. But Lockhart? _Et responsum est
+ab omnibus, Non est inventus._[133] I have often wondered how Scott took
+that episode.[134] I do not know how this view will strike you;[135] it
+seems to me the "good old honest" fashion of our fathers, though I own
+it does not agree with the New Morality. "Cad" may be perhaps an
+expression too vivacious and not well chosen; it is, at least upon my
+view, substantially just.
+
+Now if you mean to comb my wig, comb it from the right parting--I know
+you will comb it well.
+
+An infinitely small jest occurs to me in connection with the historic
+umbrella: and perhaps its infinite smallness attracts me. Would you mind
+handing it to Rudyard Kipling with the enclosed note?[136] It seems to
+me fitly to consecrate and commemorate this most absurd episode.
+
+Yours very sincerely,
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+[_Enclosure_]
+
+                        This Umbrella
+                purchased in the year 1878 by
+                  Robert Louis Stevenson
+(and faithfully stabled for more than twelve years in the
+                halls of George Saintsbury)
+  is now handed on at the suggestion of the first and
+            by the loyal hands of the second,
+                            to
+                    Rudyard Kipling.
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[130] Of this _moratorium_ I believe I duly advised R. L. S. and I don't
+think he objected. There was, if I remember rightly, a further reason
+for it--that I was living in two places at the time and the subject was
+not immediately at hand.
+
+[131] Lockhart's (self-given) name in the "_Chaldee MS._" was "the
+Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men."
+
+[132] Maupassant's ineffable hero and title-giver.
+
+[133] Hardly any school-boy of my or Stevenson's generation would have
+needed a reference to the _Essay on Murder_. But I am told that De
+Quincey has gone out of fashion, with school-boys and others.
+
+[134] We know now: also what "The Duke" said when consulted. They did
+not agree with Stevenson, but then they knew all the facts and he did
+not.
+
+[135] I should have held it myself, if the facts had been what R. L. S.
+thought them.
+
+[136] Which of course is Mr. Kipling's property, not mine. But he has
+most kindly joined in, authorising its publication, and that of the rest
+of the letter as far as he is concerned.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+The Peace
+of the Augustans
+
+A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature
+as a Place of Rest and Refreshment
+
+_Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net_
+
+     "No one living," according to the _Times_, "knows English
+     eighteenth century literature as well as Mr. Saintsbury
+     knows it.... If you do not know and like your eighteenth
+     century, then he will make you; and if you do, he will show
+     you that even what you thought the dullest parts are full of
+     rest and refreshment."
+
+     In the opinion of the _Spectator_, "Mr. Saintsbury in his
+     new book has given to the world a singularly delightful
+     gift. _The Peace of the Augustans_ is in no sense written
+     down. Yet every page is so subtly seasoned with amusing
+     comment, and the whole book is so charmingly garnished that
+     none but a dullard could fail to find delight in its
+     perusal, however little he knew of the spirit which animated
+     the eighteenth century. One can hardly imagine better
+     reading after a day of hard or uncongenial work."
+
+     "No bush is necessary to proclaim where good wine may be
+     had," says the _Glasgow Herald_, "and no author's name was
+     required to indicate the source of this always fresh and in
+     some respects original treatment of the Augustan
+     literature.... In literature there are many mansions, and
+     Mr. Saintsbury is at home in them all.... A book it has been
+     very pleasant and very profitable to read."
+
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2
+
+
+
+Handbooks of
+English Literature
+
+Edited by the late J. W. HALES, M.A.
+
+Professor of English Literature, King's College, London
+
+_Small Crown 8vo. 5s. net each_
+
+
+     =THE AGE OF ALFRED= (664-1154). By F. J. SNELL, M.A.
+
+     =THE AGE OF CHAUCER= (1346-1400). By F. J. SNELL, M.A., with
+     an Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. _Third edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF TRANSITION= (1400-1580). By F. J. SNELL, M.A. In
+     2 vols. With Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES, Vol.
+     I.--Poetry. Vol. II.--Prose and Drama. _Third edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE= (1579-1631). By THOMAS SECCOMBE and
+     J. W. ALLEN. In 2 vols. Vol. I.--Poetry and Prose, with an
+     Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. Vol. II.--Drama. _Seventh
+     edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF MILTON= (1632-1660). By Rev. Canon J. H. B.
+     MASTERMAN, M.A., with an Introduction, &c., by J. BASS
+     MULLINGER, M.A. _Eighth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF DRYDEN= (1660-1700). By the late RICHARD
+     GARNETT, C.B., LL.D. _Eighth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF POPE= (1700-1744). By JOHN DENNIS. _Tenth
+     edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF JOHNSON= (1744-1798). By THOMAS SECCOMBE.
+     _Seventh edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH= (1798-1832). By PROFESSOR C. H.
+     HERFORD, Litt.D. _Twelfth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF TENNYSON= (1830-1870). By PROFESSOR HUGH WALKER,
+     M.A. _Ninth edition._
+
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes                                          |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 108: full stop inserted after "Duke of Burgundy"        |
+  | Page 125: Second opening parenthesis from before "Cambridge  |
+  | University Press" removed                                    |
+  | Page 245: Removed closing parenthesis following "the Valley  |
+  | of the Shadow of Frederick"                                  |
+  | Page 260: "sunday" _sic_                                     |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Generally spelling, capitalization and punctuation in        |
+  | letters has been retained as per the book, with the          |
+  | following exceptions:                                        |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 305: Removed closing quote marks following "terrain"    |
+  | (Letter 54)                                                  |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Letter Book
+       Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2010 [EBook #31072]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LETTER BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<h3>Transcriber's Note</h3>
+
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in
+this text. For a complete list, please see <a href="#transnote">the bottom of
+this document</a>.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>A LETTER BOOK</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>A LETTER BOOK</h1>
+
+<h3>SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION<br />
+ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF<br />
+LETTER-WRITING</h3>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>GEORGE SAINTSBURY</h2>
+
+<p class='frontend'>LONDON<br />
+G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.</p>
+
+<p class='frontend2'>NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE AND CO.<br />
+1922</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>When my publishers were good enough to propose that
+I should undertake this book, they were also good enough
+to suggest that the Introduction should be of a character
+somewhat different from that of a school-anthology, and
+should attempt to deal with the Art of Letter-writing, and
+the nature of the Letter, as such. I formed a plan accordingly,
+by which the letters, and their separate Prefatory
+Notes, might be as it were illustrations to the Introduction,
+which was intended in turn to be a guide to
+them. Having done this with a proper <i>Pourvu que Dieu
+lui pr&ecirc;te vie</i> referring to both book and author, I thought
+it well to look up next what had been done in the way
+before me, at least to the extent of what the London
+Library could provide me in circumstances of enforced
+abstinence from the Museum and from "Bodley." From
+its catalogue I selected a curious eighteenth-century <i>Art
+of Letter Writing</i>, and four nineteenth and earliest twentieth
+century books&mdash;Roberts's <i>History of Letter Writing</i> (1843)
+with Pickering's ever-beloved title-page and his beautiful
+clear print; the <i>Litt&eacute;rature Epistolaire</i> of Barbey d'Aurevilly&mdash;a
+critic never to be neglected though always to be
+consulted with eyes wide open and brain alert; finally,
+two Essays in Dr. Jessopp's <i>Studies by a Recluse</i> and in
+the <i>Men and Letters</i> of Mr. Herbert Paul, once a very
+frequent associate of mine. The title of the first men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>tioned
+book speaks it pretty thoroughly. "The Art of
+Letter Writing: Divided into Two Parts. The First:
+Containing Rules and Directions for writing letters on all
+sorts of subjects [<i>this line as well as several others is
+Rubricked</i>] with a variety of examples equally elegant and
+instructive. The Second: a Collection of Letters on the
+Most interesting occasions of life in which are inserted&mdash;The
+proper method of Addressing Persons of all ranks;
+some necessary orthographical directions, the right forms
+of message for cards; and thoughts upon a multiplicity
+of subjects; the whole composed upon an entirely new
+plan&mdash;chiefly calculated for the instruction of youth, but
+may be [<i>sic</i>] of singular service to Gentlemen, Ladies and
+all others who are desirous to attain the true style and
+manner of a polite epistolary intercourse." May our
+own little book have no worse fortune! Mr. Roberts's
+avowedly restricts itself to the fifth century as a <i>terminus
+ad quem</i>, though it professes to start "from the earliest
+times," and its seven hundred pages deal very honestly
+and fully with their subjects. The essays of Dr. Jessopp
+and Mr. Paul are of course merely Essays, of a score or
+two of pages: though the first is pretty wide in its scope.
+There would be nothing but good to be said of either, if
+both had not been, not perhaps blasphemous but parsimonious
+of praise, towards "Our Lady of the Rocks." It
+cannot be too often or too solemnly laid down that an
+adoration of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute; as a letter-writer is not
+crotchet or fashion or affectation&mdash;is no result of merely
+taking authority on trust. The more one reads her, and
+the more one reads others, the more convinced should one
+be of her absolute non-pareility in almost every kind of
+genuine letter (as apart from letters that are really pamphlets
+or speeches or sermons) except pure love-letters, of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span>
+which we have none from her. As for <i>Litt&eacute;rature Epistolaire</i>,
+it is a collection of some two dozen reviews of various
+modern reprints of letters by distinguished writers&mdash;mostly
+but not all French. The author has throughout used the
+letters he is considering almost wholly as tell-tales of
+character, not as examples of art: and therefore he does
+not, except in possible glances, require further attention,
+though the book is full of interesting things. Its judgment
+of one of our greatest, and one of the greatest of all,
+letter-writers&mdash;Horace Walpole&mdash;is too severe, but not,
+like Macaulay's, superficially insistent on superficial defects,
+and ought not to be neglected by anyone who
+studies the subject.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, there was no need to rely on any of these
+books, they did nothing to hinder in the peculiar way
+in which I had feared some hindrance. For it is a
+nuisance to find that somebody else has done something
+in the precise way in which you have planned doing it.
+I have not yet encountered that nuisance here. Dr.
+Jessopp's general plan is most like mine&mdash;indeed some
+similarity was unavoidable: but the two are not identical,
+and I had planned mine before I knew anything about his.</p>
+
+<p>So with this prelude let us go to business, only premising
+further that the object, unlike that of the anonymous
+Augustan, is not to "give rules and instructions for writing
+good letters," except in the way (which far excels all
+rules and instructions) of showing how good letters
+have been written. Let us also modestly trust that
+the collection may deal with some "interesting occasions
+of life" and contain "thoughts on a [fair] multiplicity of
+subjects." Having been, as above observed, unable
+during the composition of this book to visit London or
+Oxford, I have had to rely occasionally on friendly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
+assistance. I owe particular thanks (as indeed I have owed
+them at almost any time these forty years) to the Rev.
+William Hunt, D.Litt., Honorary Fellow of Trinity
+College, Oxford: and I am also indebted to Miss Elsie
+Hitchcock for some kind aid at the Museum given me
+through the intermediation of Professor Ker.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the thanks given to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne,
+Mr. Kipling and Dr. Williamson in the text in reference to
+certain new or almost new letters, we owe very sincere
+gratitude for permission to reprint the following important
+matters:</p>
+
+<div class="hang"><p><i>His Honour Judge Parry.</i> Two letters from "Letters
+from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple."</p>
+
+<p><i>Messrs. Douglas &amp; Foulis.</i> A letter to Joanna Baillie,
+from "Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott."</p>
+
+<p><i>Messrs. Longmans, Green &amp; Co.</i> Two letters from Mrs.
+Carlyle's "Letters and Memorials," and one letter
+from Sir G. O. Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Lord
+Macaulay."</p>
+
+<p><i>Messrs. Macmillan &amp; Co., Ltd.</i> Three letters from "The
+Letters of Charles Dickens"; one letter by FitzGerald
+and one by Thomas Carlyle, from "Letters and
+Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald"; one
+letter from "Charles Kingsley: his Letters and
+Memories of his Life"; and two extracts from
+"Further Records, 1848-1883," by Frances Anne
+Kemble.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mr. John Murray.</i> One letter from "The Letters of
+Elizabeth Barrett Browning."</p></div>
+
+<p class='rindent'>GEORGE SAINTSBURY.</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">1 Royal Crescent, Bath</span>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>October, 1921</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="TOC">
+
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'><span class='smcap'>page</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Preface</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>I. Ancient History. II. Letters in English&mdash;before
+1700. III. The Eighteenth Century. IV. Nineteenth
+Century Letters&mdash;Early. V. Nineteenth
+Century Letters&mdash;Later. VI. Some Special Kinds
+of Letter. VII. Conclusion.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Appendix to Introduction:</span></td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Greek Letters&mdash;Synesius</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>(i) To his Brother&mdash;Preparations to meet Raiders.</td><td align='left'></td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>(ii) To Hypatia&mdash;Longing but unable to come to her.</td><td align='left'></td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Latin Letters&mdash;Pliny</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>Accepts a Brief for a Lady.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Letters of the "Dark" Ages&mdash;Sidonius Apollinaris</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>The exploits of Ecdicius.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Early Mediaeval (Twelfth Century) Letter</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_108">108</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>Duchess of Burgundy to King Louis VII.&mdash;Matchmaking.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan='2'>ENGLISH LETTERS<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">The "Paston" Letters</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>1. A Channel Fight.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>2. Margery is Willing.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Roger Ascham</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>3. "Up the Rhine."</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>4. Nostalgia for Cambridge.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Lady Mary Sidney</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>5. Have you no room at Court?</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>6. A Death-bed letter.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">John Donne</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>7-10. Letters to Magdalen Lady Herbert.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">James Howell</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>11. "Long Melford for Ever."</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>12. The White Bird.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">John Evelyn</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_139">139</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>13. How to take care of ears, eyes and brains.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Dorothy Osborne</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>14. A discourse of Flying, and several other things.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>15. Some testimonies of kindness.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Jonathan Swift</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>16. Letter-hunger.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>17. Directions for running away with her.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>18. Some manners that make a gentleman.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">George Ballard</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>19. The wickedness of Reviewers.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Thomas Gray</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>20. Romanities and Plain English.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>21. Kent, Rousseau, Lord Chatham, etc.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Horace Walpole (and W. M. Thackeray)</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_187">187</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>22. What Horace wrote.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>23. What Horace might have written.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Tobias George Smollett</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>24. Of Johnson, and Johnson's Frank&mdash;To Wilkes.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">William Cowper</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>25. About a Greenhouse.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Sydney Smith</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_201">201</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>26. Vegetation, stagnation, and assassination.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>27. His "hotel." Hasty judgments deprecated.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Sir Walter Scott</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>28. Authors and Morals.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>29. From Spinosa to Go<i>b</i>win through things in general.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Robert Southey</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>30-33. The <i>Lingo Grande</i>.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Charles Lamb</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>34. A Sigh for Solitude.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">George Gordon, Lord Byron</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>35. Of Pictures, and Sepulture, and his Daughters.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Percy Bysshe Shelley</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>36. Of Pictures only.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">John Keats</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_239">239</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>37. A Voyage, and the <i>Quarterly</i> and Charmian.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">The Carlyles</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>38. Thomas on <i>Latrappism</i>.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>39. Jane Welsh on her Travels.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>40. Jane Welsh on the blessings of Photography.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Thomas Babington Macaulay</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_253">253</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>41. Outfits, and Election Dinners. Miss Berry and
+Lady Holland.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Thomas Lovell Beddoes</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>42. Stage-coach tricks, and stage-play ghosts.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Elizabeth Barrett Browning</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_263">263</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>43. An extended Honey-moon.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Edward FitzGerald</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>44. Of Bath, and Oxford, and some Immortals.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Francis Anne Kemble</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_275">275</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>45. A Ghost in Flannel.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>46. Bakespearism.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">William Makepeace Thackeray</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_279">279</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>47. As himself.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>48. In character.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Charles Dickens</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_286">286</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>49. Straight dealing with the personages of <i>Nicholas
+Nickleby</i>.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>50. Advice to an Innocent in London.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>51. Mr. and Mrs. Harris.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Charles Kingsley</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_292">292</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>52. <i>Tom Brown's Schooldays</i>; Pike fishing; and a
+pretty thing with Garth's.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">John Ruskin</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_296">296</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>53. The Servant question.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent'><span class="smcap">Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_303">303</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class='tindent2'>54. John Gibson Lockhart, and an Umbrella.</td><td align='right'></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER<br />
+WRITING</h3>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>ANCIENT HISTORY</h3>
+
+
+<p>On letter-writing, as on most things that can themselves
+be written and talked about, there are current many
+<i>clich&eacute;s</i>&mdash;stock and banal sayings that express, or have at
+some time expressed, a certain amount of truth. The most
+familiar of these for a good many years past has been that
+the penny post has killed it. Whether revival of the
+twopenny has caused it to exhibit any kind of corresponding
+resurrectionary symptoms is a matter which
+cannot yet be pronounced upon. But it may be possible
+to avoid these <i>clich&eacute;s</i>, or at any rate to make no more
+than necessary glances at them, in composing this little
+paper, which aims at being a discussion of the Letter as
+a branch of Literature, no less than an introduction to
+the specimens of the kind which follow.</p>
+
+<p>If, according to a famous dictum, "Everything has
+been said," it follows that every definition must have
+been already made. Therefore, no doubt, somebody has,
+or many bodies have, before now defined or at least<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
+described the Letter as that kind of communication of
+thought or fact to another person which most immediately
+succeeds the oral, and supplies the claims of absence.
+You want to tell somebody something; but he or she is
+not, as they used to say "by," or perhaps there are
+circumstances (and circum<i>standers</i>) which or who make
+speech undesirable; so you "write." At first no doubt,
+you used signs or symbols like the feather with which
+Wildrake let Cromwell's advent be known in <i>Woodstock</i>&mdash;a
+most ingenious device for which, by the way, the
+recipients were scantly grateful. But when reading and
+writing came by nature, you availed yourself of these
+Nature's gifts, not always, it is to be feared, regarding the
+interconnection of the two sufficiently. There is probably
+more than one person living who has received a reply
+beginning "Dear So-and-So, Thanks for your interesting
+and <i>partially legible</i> epistle," or words to that effect.
+But that is a part of the matter which lies outside
+our range.</p>
+
+<p>On the probable general fact, however, some observations
+may be less frivolously based. If this were a sentimental
+age, as some ages in the past have been, one might
+assume that, as the first portrait is supposed to have been
+a silhouette of the present beloved, drawn on her shadow
+with a charcoaled stick, so the same, or another implement
+may have served (on what substitute for paper anybody
+pleases) to communicate with her when absent. But the
+silliness of this age&mdash;though far be it from us to dispute
+its possession of so prevailing a quality&mdash;does not take the
+form&mdash;at least <i>this</i> form&mdash;of sentiment.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>the beginnings</span></div>
+
+<p>There is, moreover, nothing silly or sentimental, though
+of course there is something that may be controverted, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
+saying that except for purely "business" purposes (which
+are as such alien from Art and have nothing to do with
+any but a part, and a rather sophisticated part, of Nature)
+the less the letter-writer forgets that he is merely substituting
+pen for tongue the better. Of course, the instruments
+and the circumstances being different, the methods
+and canons of the proceedings will be different too. In
+the letter there is no interlocutor; and there is no possibility
+of what we may call accompanying it with personal
+illustrations<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and demonstrations, if necessary or agreeable.
+But still it may be laid down, with some confidence,
+that the more the spoken word is heard in a letter the
+better, and the less that word is heard&mdash;the more it gives
+way to "book"-talk&mdash;the worse. Indeed this is not
+likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almost
+infinite possibilities of differences in personal opinion as to
+what constitutes the desirable mixture of variation and
+similarity between a conversation and a letter. Let us,
+before discussing this or saying anything more about
+the principles, say something about the history of this,
+at best so delightful, at worst so undelightful art. For if
+History, in the transferred sense of particular books called
+"histories," is rather apt to be false: nothing but
+History in the wider and higher sense will ever lead us
+to truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The
+Present is turning to Past even as we are trying to know
+it. Only the Past itself abides our knowledge.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>biblical examples</span></div>
+
+<p>Of the oldest existing examples of epistolary correspondence,
+except those contained in the Bible, the present<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+writer knows little or nothing. For, except a vanished
+smattering of Hebrew, he "has" no Oriental tongue; he
+has never been much addicted to reading translations, and
+even if he had been so has had little occasion to draw him
+to such studies, and much to draw him away from them.
+There certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens of
+the more passionate letter writing in ancient if not exactly
+pre-Christian Chinese, and probably in other tongues&mdash;but
+it is ill talking of what one does not know. In the
+Scriptures themselves letters do not come early, and the
+"token" period probably lasted long. Isaac does not
+even send a token with Jacob to validate his suit for a
+daughter of Laban. But one would have enjoyed a letter
+from Ishmael to his half-brother, when his daughter was
+married to Esau, who was so much more like a son of
+Ishmael himself than of the amiable husband of Rebekah.
+She, by the way, had herself been fetched in an equally
+unlettered transaction. It would of course be impossible,
+and might be regarded as improper, to devote much space
+here to the sacred epistolographers. But one may wonder
+whether many people have appreciated the humour of the
+two epistles of the great King Ahasuerus-Artaxerxes,
+the first commanding and the second countermanding the
+massacre of the Jews&mdash;epistles contained in the Septuagint
+"Rest of the Book of Esther" (see our Apocrypha),
+instead of the mere dry summaries which had sufficed for
+"the Hebrew and the Chaldee." The exact authenticity
+of these fuller texts is a matter of no importance, but their
+substance, whether it was the work of a Persian civil
+servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious.
+Whosoever it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications
+from "My lords" and such like things, very well<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+indeed; and the contrast of the mention in the first letter
+of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was
+approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity"
+with "the wicked wretch Aman&mdash;a stranger received of
+us ... his falsehood and cunning"&mdash;the whole of both
+letters being carefully attuned to the respective key-notes&mdash;is
+worthy of any one of the best ironists from Aristophanes
+to the late Mr. Traill.</p>
+
+<p>Between these two extremes of the Pentateuch and the
+Apocrypha there is, as has been remarked by divers commentators,
+not much about letters in the Bible. It is not
+auspicious that among the exceptions come David's letter
+commanding the betrayal of Uriah, and a little later
+Jezebel's similar prescription for the judicial murder of
+Naboth. There is, however, some hint of that curious
+attractiveness which some have seen in "the King's
+daughter all glorious within&mdash;" and without (as the Higher
+Criticism interprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland
+way with which she herself stipulates that the false witnesses
+shall be "sons of Belial."</p>
+
+<p>There is a book (once much utilised as a school prize)
+entitled <i>The History of Inventions</i>. I do not know whether
+there is a "Dictionary of Attributed Inventors." If there
+were it would contain some queer examples. One of the
+queerest is fathered (for we only have it at second hand)
+on Hellanicus, a Greek writer of respectable antiquity&mdash;the
+Peloponnesian war-time&mdash;and respectable repute for
+book-making in history, chronology, etc. It attributes the
+invention of letters&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> "epistolary correspondence"&mdash;to
+Atossa&mdash;not Mr. Matthew Arnold's Persian cat but&mdash;the
+Persian Queen, daughter of Cyrus, wife of Cambyses
+and Darius, mother of Xerxes, and in more than her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+queenly status a sister to Jezebel. Atossa had not a
+wholly amiable reputation, but she was assuredly no fool:
+and if, to borrow a famous phrase, it had been necessary
+to invent letters, there is no known reason why she might
+not have done it. But it is perfectly certain that she did
+not, and no one who combines, as all true scholars should
+endeavour to combine, an unquenchable curiosity to know
+what can be known and is worth knowing with a placid
+resignation to ignorance of what cannot be known and
+would not be worth knowing&mdash;need in the least regret the
+fact that we do not know who did.</p>
+
+<p>There are said to be Egyptian letters of immense antiquity
+and high development; but once more, I do not
+profess direct knowledge of them, and once more I hold
+that of what a man does not possess direct knowledge, of
+that he should not write. Besides, for practical purposes,
+all our literature begins with Greek: so to Greek let us
+turn. We have a fair bulk of letters in that language.
+Hercher's <i>Epistolographi Graeci</i> is a big volume, and would
+not be a small one, if you cut out the Latin translations.
+But it is unfortunate that nearly the whole, like the
+majority of later Greek literature, is the work of that
+special class called rhetoricians&mdash;a class for which, though
+our term "book-makers" may be a little too derogatory,
+"men of letters" is rarely (it is sometimes) applicable, as
+we use it when we mean to be complimentary. These
+letters are still close to "speech," thus meeting in a
+fashion our initial requirement, but they are close to the
+speech of the "orator"&mdash;of the sophisticated speaker to
+the public&mdash;not to that of genuine conversation. In fact
+in some cases it would require only the very slightest
+change to make those exercitations of the rhetors which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+are not called "epistles" definite letters in form, while
+some of the best known and characteristic of their works
+are so entitled.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>the rhetoricians</span></div>
+
+<p>It was unfortunate for the Greeks, as it would seem, and
+for us more certainly, that letter-writing was so much
+affected by these "rhetoricians." This curious class of
+persons has perhaps been too much abused: and there is
+no doubt that very great writers came out of them&mdash;to
+mention one only in each division&mdash;Lucian among the
+extremely profane, and St. Augustine among the greatest
+and most intellectual of divines. But though their habitual
+defects are to be found abundantly enough in modern
+society, these defects are, with us, as a rule distributed
+among different classes; while anciently they were united
+in this one. We have our journalists, our book-makers
+(literary, not sporting), our platform and parliamentary
+palaverers, our popular entertainers; and we also have
+our pedagogues, scholastic and collegiate, our scientific and
+other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician of old was a
+Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined
+the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of
+the one division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and
+humour, and above all the pseudo-scientific tendency to
+generalisation, classification and, to use a familiar word,
+"pottering" of the other. In particular he had a mania
+in his more serious moods for defining and sub-defining
+things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub-definitions.
+Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who
+(or a false namesake of his) has left us a capital <i>general</i>
+remark (to be given presently) on letter-writing, elaborately
+divides its kinds, with prescriptions for writing
+each, into "friendly," "commendatory," "reproving,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+"objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing,"
+"threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory,"
+"persuasive," "begging," "questioning," "answering,"
+"allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing," "defending,"
+"congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the
+neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has
+attributed to him, a list of nearly double the length,
+including most of those given above and adding many.
+Of these last, "love-letters" is the most important, and
+"mixed" the <i>canniest</i>, for it practically lets in everything.</p>
+
+<p>This way, of course, except for purely business purposes&mdash;where
+established forms save time, trouble and possible
+litigation&mdash;no possible good lies; and indeed the impossibility
+thereof is clearly enough indicated in the above-glanced-at
+general remark of Demetrius (or whoever it was)
+himself. In fact the principle of this remark and its context
+in the work called "Of Interpretation," which it is
+more usual now to call, perhaps a little rashly, "Of Style,"
+is so different from the catalogue of types that they can
+hardly come from the same author. "You <i>can</i> from this,
+as well as from all other kinds of writing, discern the character
+of the writer; indeed from none other can you discern
+it so well." Those who know a little of the history
+of Criticism will see how this anticipates the most famous
+and best definitions of Style itself, as being "the very
+man," and they may perhaps also think worthy of notice
+another passage in the same context where the author finds
+fault with a rather "fine" piece of an epistle as "not the
+way a man would talk to his friend," and even goes on to
+use the most familiar Greek word for talking&mdash;<span class='greek' title='lalein'>&#955;&#945;&#955;&#949;&#8150;&#957;</span>&mdash;in
+the same connection.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>alciphron. julian</span></div>
+
+<p>Of such "talking with a friend" we have unfortunately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+very few examples&mdash;hardly any at all&mdash;from older Greek.
+The greater collections&mdash;not much used in schools or
+colleges now but well enough known to those who really
+know Greek Literature&mdash;of Alciphron, Aristaenetus,
+Philostratus and (once most famous of all) Phalaris are&mdash;one
+must not perhaps say obvious, since men of no little
+worth were once taken in by them but&mdash;pretty easily
+discoverable counterfeits. They are sometimes, more particularly
+those of Philostratus, interesting and even beautiful;<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+they have been again sometimes at least supposed,
+particularly those of Alciphron, to give us, from the fact
+that they were largely based upon lost comedies, etc.,
+information which we should otherwise lack; and in many
+instances (Aristaenetus is perhaps here the chief) they
+must have helped towards that late Greek creation of the
+Romance to which we owe so much. Nor have we here
+much if anything to do with such questions as the morality
+of personating dead authors, or that of laying traps for
+historians. It is enough that they do not give us, except
+very rarely, good letters: and that even these exceptions
+are not in any probability <i>real</i> letters, real written "confabulations
+of friends" at all. Almost the first we have
+deserving such a description are those of the Emperor
+Julian in the fourth century of that Christ for whom he
+had such an unfortunate hatred; the most copious and
+thoroughly genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a
+little later. Of these Julian's are a good deal affected by the
+influence of Rhetoric, of which he was a great cultivator:
+and the peculiar later Platonism of Synesius fills a larger<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+proportion of his than some frivolous persons might wish.
+Julian is even thought to have "written for publication,"
+as Latin epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done
+before him. Nevertheless it is pleasant to read the
+Apostate when he is not talking Imperial or anti-Christian
+"shop," but writing to his tutor, the famous sophist and
+rhetorician Libanius, about his travels and his books and
+what not, in a fashion by no means very unlike that in
+which a young Oxford graduate might write to an undonnish
+don. It is still pleasanter to find Synesius telling
+his friends about the very thin wine and very thick honey
+of Cyrenaica; making love ("camouflaged," as they say
+to-day, under philosophy) to Hypatia, and condescending
+to mention dogs, horses and hunting now and then. But
+it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk of this department
+of Greek literature is spurious to begin with, and
+uninteresting, even if spuriousness be permitted to pass.
+The Letters of Phalaris&mdash;once famous in themselves, again
+so as furnishing one of the chief battle-grounds in the
+"Ancient and Modern" quarrel, and never to be forgotten
+because of their connection with Swift's <i>Battle of the Books</i>&mdash;are
+as dull as ditchwater in matter, and utterly destitute
+of literary distinction in style.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>roman letter-writing</span></div>
+
+<p>It is a rule, general and almost universal, that every
+branch of Latin literature is founded on, and more or less
+directly imitative of Greek. Even the Satire, which the
+Romans relied upon to prove that they could originate,
+is more apparently than really an invention. Also, though
+this may be more disputable, because much more a matter
+of personal taste, there were very few such branches in
+which the pupils equalled, much fewer in which they sur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>passed,
+their masters. But in both respects letter-writing
+may be said to be an exception. Unless we have been
+singularly unlucky in losing better Greek letters than we
+have, and extraordinarily fortunate in Fate's selection of
+the Latin letters that have come down to us, the Romans,
+though they were eager students of Rhetoric, and almost
+outwent their teachers in composing the empty things
+called Declamations, seem to have allowed this very
+practice to drain off mere verbosity, and to have written
+letters about matters which were worth pen, ink, paper
+and (as we should say) postage. We have in Greek absolutely
+no such letters from the flourishing time of the
+literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and even of Seneca&mdash;while
+as we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and
+Synesius in the older language cannot touch Sidonius
+Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> in the younger. Of
+course all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine,
+while the Greek letters attributed to Plato, Socrates and
+other great men are almost without doubt and without
+exception spurious. But there is very little likelihood
+that the Greeks of the great times wrote many "matter-ful"
+letters at all. They lived in small communities,
+where they saw each other daily and almost hourly; they
+took little interest in the affairs of other communities<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+unless they were at war with them, and when they did
+travel there were very few means of international communication.</p>
+
+<p>Women write the best letters, and get the best letters
+written to them: but it is doubtful whether Greek women,
+save persons of a certain class and other exceptions in
+different ways like Sappho and Diotima,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> ever wrote at
+all. The Romans, after their early period, were not
+merely a larger and ever larger community full of the most
+various business, and constantly extending their presence
+and their sway; but, by their unique faculty of organisation,
+they put every part of their huge world in communication
+with every other part. Here also we lack women's
+letters; but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly
+off for those of men. There have even been some audacious
+heretics who have preferred Cicero's letters to his speeches
+and treatises; Seneca, the least attractive of those before
+mentioned, put well what the poet Wordsworth called in
+his own poems "extremely va<i>loo</i>able thoughts"; one of
+the keenest of mathematicians and best of academic and
+general business men known to the present writer, the late
+Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a special favourite
+of Pliny; and if people can find nothing worse to say
+against Sidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and
+not in what was for his time archaic, Latin, his case will
+not look bad in the eyes of sensible men.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>sidonius</span></div>
+
+<p>Sidonius, like Synesius, was a Christian, and, though the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+observation may seem no more logical than Fluellen's
+about Macedon and Monmouth, besides being in more
+doubtful taste, there would seem to be some connection
+between the spread of Christianity and that of letter-writing.
+At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps
+because of the deficiency of formal literature during the
+"Dark" Ages. It is not really futile to point out that a
+very large part of the New Testament consists of
+"Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these
+epistles is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter.
+Even that which is so, often if not always, partakes of the
+character of a "live" letter to an extent which makes the
+so-called letters of the Greek Rhetoricians mere school
+exercises. And St. Paul's allusions to his journeys, his
+salutations, his acknowledgment of presents, his reference
+to the cloak and the books with its anxious "but especially
+the parchments," and his excellent advice to Timothy
+about beverages, are all the purest and most genuine
+matter for mail-bags. So is St. Peter's very gentleman-like
+(as it has been termed) retort to his brother Apostle;
+and so are both the Second and the Third of St. John.
+Indeed it is not fanciful to suggest that the account of the
+voyage which finishes the "Acts," and other parts of that
+very delightful book, are narratives much more of the kind
+one finds in letters than of the formally historical sort.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, it is worth pointing out that the
+distrust of other pagan kinds of literature which the
+Fathers manifested so strongly, and which was inherited
+from them by the clergy of the "Dark," and to some
+extent the Middle Ages, clearly could not extend to the
+practice of the Apostles. If from the Dark Ages themselves
+we have not very many, it must be remembered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+that from them we have little literature at all: while from
+the close of that period and the beginning of the next we
+have one of the most famous of all correspondences, the
+Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Of the intrinsic merit of
+these long-and far-famed compositions, as displaying character,
+there have been different opinions&mdash;one of the most
+damaging attacks on them may be found in Barbey
+d'Aurevilly's already mentioned book. But their influence
+has been lasting and enormous: and even if it were to
+turn out that they are forgeries, they are certainly early
+forgeries, and the person who forged them knew extremely
+well what he was about. There is no room here to survey,
+even in selection, the letter-crop of the Middle Ages; and
+from henceforward we must speak mainly, if not wholly
+(for some glances abroad may be permitted), of <i>English</i>
+letters.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> But the ever-increasing bonds of union&mdash;even of
+such union in disunion as war&mdash;between different European
+nations, and the developments of more complex
+civilisation, of more general education and the like&mdash;all
+tended and wrought in the same direction.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>LETTERS IN ENGLISH&mdash;BEFORE 1700</h3>
+
+
+<p>Exceptions have sometimes been taken to the earliest
+collection of genuine private letters, not official communications
+written in or inspired by Latin&mdash;which we possess
+in English. "The Paston Letters" have been, from
+opposite sides, accused of want of literary form and of not
+giving us interesting enough details in substance. The
+objections in either case<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> are untenable, and in both rather
+silly. In the first place "literary form" in the fifteenth
+century was exceedingly likely to be bad literary form,
+and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir Thomas
+Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir
+John Fortescue had occupied there something like the
+position of Mr. Tulkinghorn in <i>Bleak House</i>, we should
+not have got much "literature" from any known prose-writer
+of the period. Nor was it wanted. As for interestingness
+of matter, the people who expect newspaper-correspondent
+fine writing about the Wars of the Roses
+may be disappointed; but some of us who have had
+experience of that dialect from the Russells of the Crimea
+through the Forbeses of 1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon
+the other day will probably not be very unhappy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+The Paston Letters are simply genuine family correspondence&mdash;of
+a genuineness all the more certain because of
+their commonplaceness. It is impossible to conceive anything
+further from the initial type of the Greek rhetorical
+"letter" of which we have just been saying something.
+They are not, to any but an excessively "high-browed"
+and high-flying person, uninteresting: but the chief point
+about them is their solidity and their satisfaction, in their
+own straightforward unvarnished way, of the test we
+started with. When Margaret Paston and the rest write,
+it is because they have something to say to somebody who
+cannot be actually spoken to. And that something is said.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>ascham</span></div>
+
+<p>The next body of letters&mdash;Ascham's&mdash;which seems to
+call for notice here is of the next century. It has not a
+few points of appeal, more than one of which concern us
+very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston Letters
+were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated,
+persons entirely unacademic in character, and their
+society was that of the last trouble and convulsion through
+which the Early Middle Ages struggled into the Renaissance,
+so long delayed with us. Ascham was one of our
+chief representatives of the Renaissance itself&mdash;that is to
+say, of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly,
+a courtier and a diplomatist as well as a "don" and a
+man of letters; a sportsman as well as a schoolmaster.
+And while from all these points of view his letters have
+interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps
+more interesting to us than any other: and that is the
+fact that while he begins to write in Latin&mdash;the all but
+mother-tongue of all scholars of the time, and the universal
+language of the educated, even when not definitely scholarly,
+throughout Europe&mdash;he exchanges this for English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous
+expression of reasons for writing the <i>Toxophilus</i> in our own
+and his own tongue. There is indeed a double attraction,
+which has not been always or often noticed, in this change
+of practice. Everybody has seen how important it is, not
+merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary
+scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to
+play the bankrupt with books," but as protesting by
+anticipation against the continuance of this error which
+affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not entirely without
+hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But
+perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it
+acknowledges the peculiar character of the genuine letter&mdash;that,
+though it may be a work of art, it should not be
+one of artifice&mdash;that it is a matter of "business <i>or</i> bosoms,"
+not of study or display.</p>
+
+<p>Contemporary with these letters of Ascham, and going
+on to the end of the century and the closely coincident end
+of the reign of Elizabeth, we have a considerable bulk of
+letter-writing of more or less varied kinds. The greatest
+men of letters of the time&mdash;to the disgust of one, but not
+wholly so to that of another, class of "scholar"&mdash;give us
+little. Spenser is the most considerable exception: and
+his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, though it is
+personal to a certain extent and on Gabriel's side sufficiently
+character-revealing, is really of the hybrid kind,
+partaking rather more of pamphlet or essay than of
+letter proper. Indeed a good part of that very remarkable
+pamphlet-literature of this time, which has perhaps
+scarcely yet received its due share of attention, takes the
+letter-form: but is mostly even farther from genuine
+letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+and "Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's;
+we have laments from others, such as Lyly and Googe,
+about their disappointments as courtiers; we have a good
+deal of State correspondence. There are some, not very
+many, agreeable letters of strictly private character in
+whole or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of
+Sir Philip Sydney's mother, Lady Mary Dudley. Others
+are from time to time being made public, such as those in
+Dr. Williamson's recent book on the Admiral-Earl of
+Cumberland. As far as mere bulk goes, Elizabethan
+epistolography would take no small place, just as it would
+claim no mean one in point of interest. But in an even
+greater degree than its successor (<i>v. inf.</i>) this <i>corpus</i> would
+expose itself to the criticism that the time for perfect
+letter-writing was not quite yet, in this day of so much
+that was perfect, that the style was not quite the right
+style, the knack not yet quite achieved. And if the
+present writer&mdash;who swore fealty to Elizabethan literature
+a full third of a century ago after informal allegiance
+for nearly as long a time earlier&mdash;admits some truth in
+this, there probably is some. The letters included in it
+attract us more for the matter they contain than for the
+manner in which they contain it: and when this is the
+case no branch of literature has perfected itself in art.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>the seventeenth century</span></div>
+
+<p>The position of the seventeenth century in England with
+regard to letter-writing has been the subject of rather
+different opinions. The bulk of its contributions is of
+course very considerable: and some of the groups are of
+prominent importance, the most singular, if not the most
+excellent, being Cromwell's, again to be mentioned. As
+in other cases and departments this century offers a
+curious "split" between its earlier part which declines<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>&mdash;not
+in goodness but like human life in vitality&mdash;from, but
+still preserves the character of, the pure Elizabethan, and
+its later, which grows up again&mdash;not in goodness but simply
+in the same vitality&mdash;towards the Augustan. This relationship
+is sufficiently illustrated in the actual letters. The
+great political importance of the Civil War of course reflects
+itself in them. Indeed it may almost be said that
+for some time letters are wholly concerned with such
+things, though of course there are partial exceptions, such
+as those of Dorothy Osborne&mdash;"mild Dorothea" as she
+afterwards became, though there is no mere mildness of
+the contemptuous meaning in her correspondence. In
+most remarkable contrast to these stand the somewhat
+earlier letters of James Howell&mdash;our first examples perhaps
+of letters "written for publication" in the fullest sense,
+very agreeably varied in subject and great favourites
+with a good many people, notably Thackeray&mdash;but only
+in part (if at all) genuine private correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>Not a few men otherwise distinguished in literature
+wrote letters&mdash;sometimes in curious contrast with other
+productions of theirs. The most remarkable instance of
+this, but an instance easily comprehensible, is that of
+Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense correspondence
+has ever been printed, but there is no reason
+to expect from the remainder&mdash;whether actually extant,
+mislaid or lost&mdash;anything better than the examples which
+are now accessible, and which are for the most part the
+very opposite in every respect of the famous and delectable
+Diary. They are perfectly "proper," and for the most
+part extremely dull; while propriety is certainly not the
+most salient characteristic of the Diary; and the diarist
+manages, in the most eccentric manner, to communicate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+interest not merely to things more specially regarded as
+"interesting," but to his accounts and his ailments, his
+business and his political history. His contemporary and
+rather patronising friend Evelyn keeps his performances
+less far apart from each other: but is certainly, though a
+representative, not a great letter-writer, and the few that
+we have of Pepys' patronised fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden
+are of no great mark, though not superfluous. In the
+earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken
+off its control as the epistolary language; and it was not
+till quite the other end that English itself became supple
+and docile enough for the purposes of the letter-writer
+proper. It was excellent for such things as formal Dedications,
+semi-historical narratives, and the like. And it
+could, as in Sir Thomas Browne's, supply another contrast,
+much more pleasing than that referred to above, of
+domestic familiarity with a most poetical transcendence
+of style in published work. Yet, as was the case with
+the novel, the letter, to gain perfection, still wanted something
+easier than the grand style of the seventeenth
+century and more polished than its familiar style.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span></p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>the eighteenth century</span></div>
+
+<p>But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in
+respect of letter-writing it is impossible for anything but
+sheer ignorance, hopeless want of critical discernment, or
+idle paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement,
+that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion
+worth attention that century was, in the two European
+literatures which were equally free from crudity and
+decadence&mdash;French and English&mdash;the very palmiest day
+of the art. Everybody wrote letters: and a surprising
+number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most
+famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray
+and Cowper&mdash;belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"&mdash;our
+most famous she-ditto&mdash;belongs to it by all but her
+childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges
+would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned.
+The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more
+remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
+itself&mdash;certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship&mdash;to
+the letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of
+the choicer examples in this time is not really more
+important than the abundance, variety and popularity of
+its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
+of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+it was the "letterwritingest" of ages from almost every
+point of view. In its least as in its most dignified moods
+it even overflowed into verse if not into poetry as a medium.
+Serious epistles had&mdash;of course on classical models&mdash;been
+written in verse for a long time. But now in England
+more modern patterns, and especially Anstey's <i>New Bath
+Guide</i>, started the fashion of actual correspondence in
+doggerel verse with no thought of print&mdash;a practice in which
+persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's good-natured
+but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like
+Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till
+Victorian times, if then. At the present moment one does
+not remember an exact equivalent in England to the story
+of two good writers in French if not French writers<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> living
+in the same house, meeting constantly during the day, yet
+exchanging letters, and not short ones, before breakfast.
+But very likely there is or was one, and more than one.</p>
+
+<p>For those no doubt estimable persons who are not
+content with facts but must have some explanations of
+them, it is less difficult to supply such things than is sometimes
+the case. One&mdash;the attainment at last of a
+"middle" style neither grand nor vulgar&mdash;has already
+been glanced at. It has been often and quite truly
+observed that there are sentences, passages, paragraphs,
+almost whole letters in Horace Walpole and Lady Mary
+Wortley Montagu, in Fanny Burney and in Cowper, which
+no one would think old-fashioned at the present day in
+any context where modern slang did not suggest itself as
+natural. But this was by no means the only predisposing
+cause, though perhaps most of the others were, in this
+way or that, connected with it. Both in France and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+England literature and social matters generally were in
+something like what political economists call "the stationary
+state" till (as rather frequently happens with such
+apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed to
+the Niagara of the French Revolution, and the rapids of
+the quarter-century War. There were no great poets:<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>
+and even verse-writers were rarely grand: but there was
+a greater diffusion of competent writing faculty than had
+been seen before or perhaps&mdash;for all the time, talk, trouble,
+and money spent on "education,"&mdash;has been since. New
+divisions and departments of interest were accumulating&mdash;not
+merely in Literature itself<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> (as to which, if people's
+ideas were rather limited, they <i>had</i> ideas), but in the arts
+which were in some cases practised almost for the first
+time and in all taken more seriously, in foreign and home
+politics, commerce, manufactures, all manner of things.
+People were by no means so apt to stay in the same place
+as they had been: and when friends were in different
+places they had much easier means of communicating with
+each other. Nor should it be forgotten that the more
+elaborate system of ceremonial manners which then prevailed,
+but which has been at first gradually, and latterly
+with a run, breaking down for the last hundred years, had
+an important influence on letter-writing. One does not
+of course refer merely to elaborate formulas of beginning
+and ending&mdash;such as make even the greatest praisers
+of times past among us smile a little when they find<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+Dr. Johnson addressing his own step-daughter as "Dear
+Madam," and being her "most humble servant" though
+in the course of the letter he may use the most affectionate
+and intimate expressions. But the manners of yester-year
+made it obligatory to make your letters&mdash;unless they were
+merely what were called "cards" of invitation, message,
+etc.&mdash;to some extent <i>substantive</i>. You gave the news of
+the day, if your correspondent was not likely to know it;
+the news of the place, especially if you were living in a
+University town or a Cathedral city. If you had read a
+book you very often criticised it: if you had been to any
+kind of entertainment you reported on it, etc. etc. Of
+course all this is still done by people who really do write
+real letters: but it is certainly done by a much smaller
+proportion of letter-writers than was the case two hundred,
+one hundred, or even fifty years ago. The newspaper has
+probably done more to kill letters than any penny post,
+halfpenny postcard or even sixpenny telegram could do.
+Nor perhaps have we yet mentioned the most powerful
+destructive agent of all, and that is the ever increasing
+want of leisure. The dulness of modern Jack, in letters
+as elsewhere, arises from the fact that when he is not at
+work he is too desperately set on playing to have time for
+anything else. The Augustans are not usually thought
+God-like: but they have this of Gods, that they "lived
+<i>easily</i>."</p>
+
+<p>There is perhaps still something to be said as to the
+apparently almost pre-established harmony between the
+eighteenth century and letter-writing. It concerns what
+has been called the "<i>Peace</i> of the Augustans"; the at
+least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of
+passion and the most riotous kinds of fun. Tragedy may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+be very fine in letters, as it may be anywhere: but it is
+in them the most dangerous,<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> most rarely successful and
+most frequently failed-in of all motives&mdash;again as it is
+everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but it should be
+fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in&mdash;not
+roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter
+runs the risk of being excruciating in a sadly literal sense.
+Now the men of good Queen Anne and the first three
+Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at any
+rate; and there are few better examples of the happy
+mean than the best of their letters. The person who is
+bored by any one of those sets which have been mentioned
+must bring the boredom with him&mdash;as, by the way,
+complainers of that state of suffering do much oftener
+than they wot of. Nor is much less to be said of scores
+of less famous epistolers of the time, from the generation
+of Berkeley and Byrom to that of Scott and Southey.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>swift</span></div>
+
+<p>To begin with Swift, it is a scarcely disputable fact that
+opinions about this giant of English literature&mdash;not merely
+as to his personal character, though perhaps this has had
+more to do with the matter than appears on the surface,
+but as to his exact literary value&mdash;have differed almost
+incomprehensibly. Johnson thought, or at least affected
+to think, that <i>A Tale of a Tub</i> could not be Swift's, because
+it was too good for him, and that "Tom Davies might
+have written <i>The Conduct of the Allies</i>": while on the
+other hand Thackeray, indulging in the most extravagant
+denunciation of Swift as a man, did the very fullest,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+though not in the least too full, homage to his genius.
+But one does not know many things more surprising in
+the long list of contradictory criticisms of man and genius
+alike, than Mr. Herbert Paul's disapproval of the <i>Journal
+to Stella</i> as letters while admitting its excellence as
+"narrative."<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> To other judges these are some of the most
+perfect letters in existence, some of the most absolutely
+genuine and free from the slightest taint of writing for
+publication; some of the most extraordinarily blended of
+intense intimacy which is neither ridiculous nor productive
+of the shame-faced feeling that you ought not to have
+heard it; and full of that dealing with matters less intimate
+but still interesting to both correspondents which
+displays the "narrative" excellence conceded by this
+acute critic. It must of course be remembered that these
+"Journal-letters" are by no means Swift's only proofs of
+his epistolary expertness. The Vanessa ones perhaps display
+a little of the hopelessly enigmatic character which
+spreads like a mist over the whole of that ill-starred
+relationship: but they make all the more useful contrast
+to the "wholeheartedness"&mdash;one may even use that word
+in reference to the little bit of what we may call constructive
+deception as to "the other person"&mdash;of those to
+her rival.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> Those to Pope (of which so shabby a use was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+made by their strangely constituted recipient), to Bolingbroke
+and others are among the best of friendly letters:
+and the curious batch to the Duchess of Queensberry
+might be classed with those "court-paying" letters of
+man to woman which are elsewhere more particularly
+noted. But the "Stella" or "Stella-cum-Dingley"
+division (if that most singular of value-completing zeros
+is to be brought in) is a thing by itself. Perhaps appreciating
+or not appreciating the "little language" is a
+matter very largely of personal constitution, and the
+failure to appreciate is (like colour-blindness or other
+physical deficiencies) a thing to be sorry for, not to condemn.
+But one might have thought that even if what we
+may call "feeling" of this were absent there would be an
+intellectual understanding of the way in which it completes
+the whole-heartedness just mentioned&mdash;the manner
+in which the writer deals with politics, society, letters, the
+common ways of life, and his own passion&mdash;this last sometimes
+in the fore-sometimes in the background, but never
+far off. Other letters, from Horace Walpole's downwards,
+may contain a panorama of life as brilliant as these give,
+or more brilliant. Yet it is too frequently a panorama or
+a puppet show, or at the best a marvellously acted but
+somewhat bloodless drama. On the other hand, the pure
+passion-letters lack as a rule this many-sidedness. With
+Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection shown us
+more varied interests. But through it all there is an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his&mdash;"Only
+a woman's hair"&mdash;and that hair threads, in subtle fashion,
+the whole of the Journal, turning the panorama to something
+felt as well as seen, and the puppet-show to realities
+of flesh and blood.</p>
+
+<p>That this magical transforming element is wanting in
+a most remarkable pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield
+and "Lady Mary," has been generally allowed; though
+a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for
+"my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that
+"my lord" did not so much lack as dissemble heart and
+even sometimes showed the heart he had. It would be
+out of our proper line to discuss such questions here at
+any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have
+not yet had time to look into the matter for themselves
+that Pope's coarse attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's
+fine rhetorical rebuff of Chesterfield were unquestionably
+outbursts of hurt personal pride. Horace Walpole made
+hits at both for reasons which we may call personal at
+second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law
+and the other an enemy of his father. As for
+Dickens' caricature of "Sir John Chester" in <i>Barnaby
+Rudge</i> it is not so much a caricature as a sheer and inexcusable
+libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the
+Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no
+advanced years who have been introduced to them in the
+twentieth century have been known to find them positively
+captivating: and their attractions are, not merely
+as between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly
+various. Lady Mary's forte&mdash;perhaps in direct
+following of her great forerunner and part namesake,
+Marie de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, though she spoke inadvisedly of her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>&mdash;lies
+in description of places and manners, and in literary
+criticism.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier
+days, and of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and
+other experiences, etc., rank among the best things of the
+kind in English; and her critical acuteness, assisted as it
+was by no small possession of what might almost be called
+scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also, she
+does all these things naturally&mdash;with that naturalness at
+which&mdash;when they possess it at all&mdash;women are so much
+better than men. People say a lady can never pass a
+glass without looking at herself. (One thinks by the way
+one has seen men do that.) But after all what the glass
+gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women
+learn to see it in others as well as in themselves.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>chesterfield</span></div>
+
+<p>Few English writers have suffered more injustice in
+popular estimation than Chesterfield. Even putting aside
+the abuse by which, as above mentioned, Johnson showed
+(on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that he had more
+in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both
+their names&mdash;that is to say an <i>insanabile vulnus</i> of vanity&mdash;there
+remain sources of mistakes and prejudice which
+have been all too freely tapped. The miscellaneous letters&mdash;which
+show sides of him quite different from those most
+in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son"&mdash;are
+rarely read: these latter have been, at least once and
+probably oftener, made into a schoolbook for translation
+into other languages&mdash;an office by no means likely to
+conciliate affection. And even when they are not suspected
+of positive immorality there is a too general idea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+that they are frivolously and trivially didactic&mdash;the sort
+of thing that Mr. Turveydrop the elder might have written
+on Deportment&mdash;if he had had brains enough. Yet again,
+unbiassed appreciation of them has been hampered by all
+sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that young
+Stanhope actually turned out to be&mdash;a point of merely
+gossiping importance in any case, and, whatever be the
+facts of this one, having no more to do with the merit of
+the letters than the other fact that some people make
+mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the multiplication
+table has to do with the value of that composition.
+As a matter of relevant fact the letters&mdash;except
+(and even here the accusations against them are much
+exaggerated) from the point of view of very severe morality
+in regard to one or two points&mdash;perhaps no more than one&mdash;are
+full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe
+experience of the world. The manners they recommend
+are not those of any but a very exceptional "dancing
+master," they are those of a gentleman. The temper that
+they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator is
+positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and
+the other batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor
+in the Earldom (the Lord Chesterfield for forging whose
+name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most curious and
+unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the
+highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused
+of being nothing else, to make himself intelligible and
+agreeable to young&mdash;at first very young&mdash;boys. In his
+letters to older folk, both men and women, qualities for
+which there was no room in the others arise&mdash;the thoughts
+of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being
+quite different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+"insolent"<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> worldling who has been so often put in the
+place of the real Chesterfield. And independently of all this
+there is present in all these letters&mdash;though most attractively
+in those to his son&mdash;a power of literary expression
+which would have made the fortune of any professional
+writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was too
+often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time,
+it was, within those limitations, accomplished: and it was
+accompanied, as mere taste very often is not, by no small
+command of literary production. He could and did write
+admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is attested
+in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole,
+and some of the passages in the letters where he indulges
+in description or even dialogue are by no means unworthy
+of the best genteel comedy of the time. But he could
+also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly serious," as
+in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few contributions
+to the half-developed periodical literature of
+his day show how valuable he would have been to the
+more advanced Review or Magazine of the nineteenth
+century: and if he had chosen to write Memoirs they
+would probably have been among the best in English.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>
+Now the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most
+straitly and intimately connected forms of literature.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>horace walpole</span></div>
+
+<p>Horace Walpole&mdash;like his two contemporaries, fellow-members
+of English aristocratic society, acquaintances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+and objects of aversion just discussed&mdash;has been the
+subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of whom he
+himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not
+know his letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten
+published works) dismissed him with good-natured
+belittlement. Macaulay made him the subject
+of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those
+antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run,
+have done the writer more harm than his subjects. To
+take one example less likely to be known to English
+readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very
+acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly,
+though he admits Horace's <i>esprit</i> pronounces it <i>un
+fruit brillant, amer, et glac&eacute;</i>. There are undoubtedly many
+things to be said against him as a man&mdash;if you take the
+"Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially so. He
+was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly awkward&mdash;though
+from one point of view not wholly unamiable&mdash;peculiarity
+of being what may be called spiteful at second
+hand. To stand up for your friends at the proper time
+and in the proper place is the duty, and should be the
+pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the
+most part, if not almost always, to <i>back</i>-bite your friends'
+supposed enemies&mdash;often when they have done nothing
+adverse to those friends on the particular occasion&mdash;is the
+act at the best of an intempestively officious person, at
+the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing this
+in regard to all sorts of people&mdash;his abuse of Johnson
+himself, of Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and
+others, having no personal excuse or reason whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in
+which men of other times should be too ready to throw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+stones, for taste in all such matters at almost all times,
+however sure a stronghold it may seem to those who
+occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others.
+He had also a considerable touch of almost original genius
+in important kinds of literature, as <i>The Mysterious Mother</i>
+and <i>The Castle of Otranto</i> showed&mdash;a touch which undoubtedly
+helped him in his letters. But of critical power
+he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save, perhaps
+in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate.
+Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his
+life; though he passed many of them in the House of
+Commons and might have passed several in the House of
+Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was young
+he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution
+of Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution
+was to him anathema and he was horrified at the execution
+of Louis XVI. He was incapable of sustaining, perhaps
+of understanding, an argument: everything with him was
+a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them,
+of personal and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.</p>
+
+<p>But all this does not prevent him from being one of the
+best letter-writers in the English language: and if you
+take bulk of work along with variety of subject; maintenance
+of interest and craftsmanship as well as bulk,
+perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard edition
+of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is
+in sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few
+readers of good taste and fair knowledge who would object
+if it could be extended to sixty. There is perhaps no body
+of epistles except Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'s own&mdash;which
+Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the
+feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>&mdash;exhibiting
+the possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly
+or more copiously.</p>
+
+<p>To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be
+irrelevant in such an Introduction as this: and from
+what has just been said it would seem that these letters
+will form as good a specimen for examination as any.
+They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody
+but Thackeray, in the wonderful chapter of <i>The Virginians</i>
+where Horace is made to describe his first interview with
+one of the heroes, has ever quite imitated them. Their
+style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter so much
+of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character&mdash;his
+own that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with
+any one else's&mdash;are constant but not deeply drawn. He
+cannot, or at least does not, give a plot of any kind:
+every letter is a sort of <i>review</i> of the subject&mdash;larger or
+smaller&mdash;from the really masterly accounts of the trial of
+the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most
+trivial notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of
+remarkable hands at cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's
+Patty) in her autumn years passing his windows with her
+gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters
+appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society;
+curious belated love-making with the Miss Berrys;
+scandal (a great deal of it); charity (a little, but more
+than the popular conception of Horace allows for); the
+court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things
+except religion (though it is said Horace had an early
+touch of Methodism) and really serious thought of any
+kind, form the budget of his letter-bag. And it is all
+handled with the most unexpected equality of success.
+There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+chickens in a sort of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting
+"the dish to fly about our ears" is perhaps the
+most exciting incident<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> of the sixteen volumes and seven
+or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest;
+and that of a kind that does not stale itself.</p>
+
+<p>The fact would seem to be that the art of letter-writing
+is a sort of mosaic or mac&eacute;doine of nearly all departments
+of the general Art of Literature. You want constant
+touches of the art narrative, and not very seldom some of
+the art dramatic. Always you want that of conversation&mdash;subtly
+differentiated. Occasionally, though in the
+ordinary letter not very often, you want argument: much
+oftener description. Pathos, tenderness, etc., are more
+exceptionally required: and it is, in modern times at
+least, generally accepted that in the letter consolatory,
+that almost greatest of Shakespearian magic phrases, "the
+rest is silence" should never be forgotten and very quickly
+applied. Wit is welcome, if it be well managed: but that
+is a pretty constant proviso in regard to the particular
+element. Perhaps the greatest negative caution of all is
+that the letter should not be <i>obviously</i> "written for publication."</p>
+
+<p>Now the curious thing about Walpole is that his letters
+were, pretty certainly in some cases (those to Mann) and
+not improbably in nearly all, written with some view to
+publication if only of a limited sort, and yet that the
+intention is rarely prominent to an offensive degree. Even
+if we did not know the curious and disgusting tricks that
+Pope played with his, we should be certain that he was
+always thinking of the possibility of somebody else than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+the reader to whom they were addressed reading them.
+With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact in the
+case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge
+in any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs
+and never offends. An unkind critic with a turn for rather
+obvious epigram might say that the man's nature was so
+artificial that his artifice seems natural. If so, all the
+more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather
+in his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake
+the writer, his letters take a slight but sufficient colour of
+difference according to the personality of the recipient.
+He does not write to Montagu exactly as he writes to
+Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as
+to earlier she-correspondents. So once more, though there
+are large and important possible subjects for letters on
+which "Horry" does not write at all, it is questionable
+whether, everything being counted in that he has, and no
+unfair offsets allowed for what he does not attempt, we
+have in English any superior to him as a letter-writer.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>gray</span></div>
+
+<p>The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler&mdash;Walpole's
+schoolfellow and except for the time of a
+quarrel (the blame of which Horace rather generously took
+upon himself but in which there were doubtless faults on
+both sides)<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> life-long friend&mdash;is curiously different. Gray
+was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic
+imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+as some who are not poets can, even appreciate it. In
+more than one other intellectual gift he soared above
+Horace. He was essentially a scholar, while his friend
+was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the
+scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable
+extent: and thus was enabled to display an orderliness
+of thought by no means universal in men of letters, and
+(at least according to common estimation) positively rare
+in poets. His tastes were as various as his friend's: but
+instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and dislikings,
+they were aesthetically conceived and connected.
+He was not exactly an amiable person: indeed, though
+there was less spitefulness in him than in Horace there
+was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for the
+feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed
+itself so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold&mdash;that he
+"never spoke out"&mdash;it might be thought, if it really
+existed, to have been rather fatal to letter-writing, in
+which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one
+of the very last things to be desired. And some of the
+positive characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated
+(not the poetry&mdash;poets have usually been good
+epistolers) might not seem much more suitable.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, however, Gray <i>is</i> a good letter-writer&mdash;a
+very good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as
+might be expected from what has been said, carry much
+heavier metal than Horace's; but in another sense they
+are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in
+bulk than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative"
+though hardly more leisured writer:<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> and&mdash;as not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+a defect but a consequence of the quality just attributed
+to them&mdash;they do not quite carry the reader along with
+them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the
+others. But no one save a dunce can find them dull:
+and their variety is astonishing when one remembers that
+the writer was, for great part of his life, a kind of recluse.
+He touches almost everything except love (one wonders
+whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure
+that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss
+Speed which would have filled the gap) and with a result
+of artistic success even more decided than that assigned
+to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's enemy or at least
+"incompatible" Johnson.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> His letters of travel are
+admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes
+extremely prejudiced, very clever; those of University
+society and squabbles among the very best that
+we have in English; those touching "the picturesque"
+extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those
+touching literature among the least one-sided of their
+time. If there are, as observed or hinted above, some
+unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the poor
+creature Mason; his general attitude to his friends the
+Whartons; and his communications with younger men
+like Norton Nicholls and Bonstetten, go far to remove, or,
+at least, to counterbalance, the impression.</p>
+
+<p>This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+emphasize what is evident enough in almost all, a freedom
+on his part (which from some things in his character and
+history we might not altogether have expected) from a
+fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in letters.
+This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more
+or less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side,"
+"patronising," etc. He may sometimes come near this
+pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never quite slips into it,
+being probably preserved by that sense of humour which
+he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it
+in verse and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether,
+Gray's letters may be said to have few superiors
+in the combination of intellectual weight and force with
+"pastime" interest. To some of course they may be
+chiefly or additionally interesting because of such light as
+they throw or withhold on a rather problematic character,
+but this, like the allegory in Spenser according to Hazlitt,
+"won't bite" anyone who lets it alone. They are extremely
+good letters to read: and the more points of
+interest they provide for any reader the better for that
+reader himself. Once more too, they illustrate the principle
+laid down at the beginning of this paper. They are
+good letters because they are, with the usual subtle difference
+necessary, like very good talk, recorded.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>cowper</span></div>
+
+<p>Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of
+the fifth of our selected eighteenth-century letter-writers.
+Cowper's poetry has gone through not very strongly
+marked but rather curious variations of critical estimate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+Like all transition writers he was a little too much in front
+of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too
+much behind that of the time immediately succeeding.
+There may have been a very brief period, before the great
+romantic poets of the early nineteenth century became
+known, when he "drove" young persons like Marianne
+Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their
+periods succeed and do not resemble each other.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> He had
+probably less hold on this time&mdash;when he had the best
+chance of popularity&mdash;than Crabbe, one of his own group,
+while he was destitute of the extraordinary appeals&mdash;which
+might be altogether unrecognised for a time but
+when felt are unmistakable&mdash;of the other two, Burns and
+Blake, of the poets of the seventeen-eighties. His religiosity
+was a doubtful "asset" as people say nowadays:
+and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward
+side. But as to his letters there has hardly at any time,
+since they became known, existed a difference of opinion
+among competent judges. There may be some unfortunates
+for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly
+reckon as arbiters of taste the people for whom even
+brandy is too mild unless you empty the cayenne cruet
+into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as a poet-critic
+who ought to have known better once scornfully called
+them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the
+correspondence: while as regards the madness this supplies
+one of the most puzzling and perhaps not the least disquieting
+of "human documents." A reader may say&mdash;by
+no means in his haste, but after consideration&mdash;not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+merely "Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?"
+but "How on earth did it happen that the writer of these
+<i>ever</i> went mad?" even with the assistance of Newton,
+and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.</p>
+
+<p>For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at
+their frequent and pretty voluminous best, are some that
+seem not merely inconsistent with insanity, but likely to
+be positive antidotes to and preservatives from it. There
+is a quiet humour&mdash;not of the fantastic kind which, as in
+Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near
+alliance to <i>over</i>-balance of mind&mdash;but <i>counter</i>-balancing,
+antiseptic, <i>salt</i>. There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent
+common-sense; excellent manners; an almost
+total absence in that part of the letters which we are now
+considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a>
+It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem,
+"What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and
+more "noble substance" in Cowper? though there is not
+much doubt about the agency and little about the principal
+agents that effected the mischief. But it is quite
+relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are
+things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing.
+And sometimes one cannot help regretfully wondering
+whether, if he&mdash;who dealt so admirably with such interests
+as were open to him&mdash;had had more and wider ones to
+deal with, <i>we</i> should not have had still more varied and
+still more delightful letters, and <i>he</i> would have escaped
+the terrible fate that fell on him. For although Cowper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+was the reverse of selfish in the ordinary sense, he was
+intensely self-centred, and his life gave too much opportunity
+for that excessive self-concentration which is the
+very hotbed of mental disease.</p>
+
+<p>It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and
+it perhaps shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty
+is when it is possessed&mdash;that Cowper's letters are as good
+as they are: while that point of view also helps us to
+understand why they are sometimes not so good.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Of all the floating thoughts we find<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the surface of the mind,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing,
+there are few in his case which are of more unequal
+value than his criticisms. Cowper had more than one of
+the makings of a critic, and a very important critic. He
+was, or at any rate had been once, something of a scholar;
+he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps
+even often the case) helped <i>knowingly</i> to effect, one of the
+most epoch-making changes in English literature. But
+for the greater part of his life he read very little; he had
+little chance of anything like literary discussion with his
+peers; and accordingly his critical remarks are random,
+uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at
+the moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or
+disagreement.</p>
+
+<p>But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as
+a letter-writer so little as for things of this kind: and
+even things of this kind take the benefit of what Coleridge
+happily called&mdash;and what everybody has since wisely
+followed Coleridge in calling&mdash;his "divine chit-chat." As
+with Walpole&mdash;though with that difference of idiosyncrasy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+which all the best things have from one another&mdash;it does
+not in the least matter what, among mundane affairs at
+least, Cowper was talking about. If his conversation&mdash;and
+some of the few <i>habitu&eacute;s</i> of Olney say it was&mdash;was anything
+like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over
+even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not
+appetite" as they said with that slight touch of priggishness
+which has been visited upon them heavily, but which
+perhaps had more to do with their merits than more
+mannerless periods will allow.</p>
+
+<p>And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree,
+that extraordinary power of making anything interesting&mdash;of
+entirely transcending the subject&mdash;which belongs to
+the letter-writer in probably a greater measure than to
+any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.
+The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often
+the very smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance
+and condition of the fish his correspondents buy for him
+or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish and lived, before
+railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the most
+uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most
+characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief
+descant on wigs with a suggestion that fashion should
+decree the cutting off of people's own legs and the substitution
+of artificial ones); the height of chairs and
+candlesticks&mdash;anything will do. He remarks gravely
+somewhere, "What nature expressly designed me for,
+I have never been able to conjecture; I seem to myself
+so universally disqualified for the common and customary
+occupations and amusements of mankind." Perhaps
+poetry&mdash;at least poetry of the calibre of "Yardley Oak,"
+and "The Castaway," of "Boadicea" and the "Royal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+George" in one division; of "John Gilpin" in the other,
+may not be quite properly classed among the "common
+and customary occupations of mankind." But letter-writing
+might without great impropriety be so classed:
+and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Nature intended
+Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether he writes
+"The passages and events of the day as well as of the
+night are little better than dreams" or "An almost
+general cessation of egg-laying among the hens has made
+it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to enterprise a cake" one
+has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that agreeable
+sensation which at one time visited Tennyson's Northern
+Farmer. One "thinks he's said what he ought to 'a said"
+in the exact manner in which he ought to have said it.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>minors</span></div>
+
+<p>It is however most important to remember that these
+Five are only, as it were, commanding officers of the great
+Army, representative of the very numerous constituents,
+who do the service and enjoy the franchise of letter-writing
+in the eighteenth century. There is hardly a writer of
+distinction in any other kind whose letters are not noteworthy;
+and there are very numerous letter-writers of
+interest who are scarcely distinguished in any other way.
+Perhaps Fielding disappoints us most in this section by
+the absence of correspondence, all the more so that the
+"Voyage to Lisbon" is practically letter-stuff of the best.
+From Smollett also we might have more&mdash;especially more
+like his letter to Wilkes on the subject of the supposed
+impressment of Johnson's negro servant Frank, which we
+hope to give here. Sterne's character would certainly be
+better if his astonishing daughter had suppressed some of
+his epistles, but it would be much less distinct, and they
+are often, if sometimes discreditably so, amusing if not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+edifying. The vast mass of Richardson's correspondence
+would correspond in another sense to the volume of his
+novels. We have letters from Berkeley at the beginning
+and others from Gibbon at the end&mdash;these last peculiarly
+valuable, because, as sometimes but not perhaps very often
+happens, they do not merely illustrate but supplement and
+complete the published work. From ladies, courtly,
+domestic, literary and others, we have shelves&mdash;and cases&mdash;and
+almost libraries full; from the lively chat of the Lepels
+and Bellendens and Howards of the early Georgian time to
+those copious and unstudied but never dull, compositions
+which Fanny Burney poured forth to "Susan and Fredy,"
+to Maria Allen and to "Daddy Crisp" and a score of
+others; those of the Montagu circle; the documents upon
+which some have based aspersion and others defence of
+Mrs. Thrale; and the prose utterances of the "Swan of
+Lichfield," otherwise Miss Seward.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> There are Shenstone's
+letters for samples of one kind and those of the
+Revd. Mr. Warner (the supposed original of Thackeray's
+Parson Sampson) for another and very different one.
+Even outside the proper and real "mail-bag" letter all
+sorts of writings&mdash;travels, pamphlets, philosophical and
+theological arguments, almost everything&mdash;throw themselves
+into the letter form. To come back to that with
+which we began there is no doubt that the eighteenth
+century is the century of the letter with us.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>early nineteenth century groups</span></div>
+
+<p>There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting
+here that the art of letter-writing died with the century in
+which it flourished so greatly. In the first place, periods
+of literary art seldom or never "die" in a moment like a
+tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion that centennial
+years necessarily divide such periods, as well as
+the centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical
+delusion. There have been dates in our history&mdash;1400 was
+one of them&mdash;where something of the kind seems to have
+happened: but they are very rare. Most ships of literature
+at such times are fortunately what is called in actual
+ships "clinker-built"&mdash;that is to say overlappingly&mdash;and
+except at 1600 this has never been so much the case as
+two hundred years later and one hundred ago. When the
+eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott
+and Southey were men approaching more or less closely,
+thirty years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore
+were at least, and some of them well, past the conventional
+"coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and Shelley were
+boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the
+first mentioned of these groups there was still very marked
+eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy; in the second some;
+and it was by no means absent from Byron though hardly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+present at all in most respects as regards Shelley and
+Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one
+or two individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as
+concerns letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no
+figure as a letter-writer, and nobody who has appreciated
+his other work would expect him to do so. The first
+requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"&mdash;in a rather
+peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it
+has been employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth
+could <i>preach</i>&mdash;nearly always in a manner deserving respect
+and sometimes in one commanding almost infinite admiration;
+but when the letter-writer begins to preach he is in
+danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's
+letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but
+more than one of his weaknesses appears in them.</p>
+
+<p>The excellence of Scott's, though always discoverable in
+Lockhart, was perhaps never easily appreciable till they
+were separately collected and published not very many
+years ago. It may indeed be suggested that the "Life
+and Letters" system, though very valuable as regards the
+"Life" is apt a little to obscure the excellence of the
+"Letters" themselves. Of this particular collection it is
+not too much to say that while it threw not the least stain
+on the character of one of the most faultless (one singular
+and heavily punished lapse excepted) of men of letters, it
+positively enhanced our knowledge of the variety of his
+literary powers.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps however the best of letter-writers amongst these
+four protagonists of the great Romantic Revival in England
+(the inevitable attempt sometimes made now to
+quarrel with that term is as inevitably silly) is the least
+good poet. Southey's letters, never yet fully but very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+voluminously published, have not been altogether fortunate
+in their fashion of publication. There have been
+questionings about the propriety of "Selected" Works;
+but there surely can be little doubt that in the case of
+Letters a certain amount of selection is not only justifiable
+but almost imperative. Everyone at all addicted to
+correspondence must know that in writing to different
+people on the same or closely adjacent days, if "anything
+has" in the common phrase "happened" he is bound to
+repeat himself. He may, if he has the sense of art, take
+care to vary his phrase even though he knows that no two
+letters will have the same reader; but he cannot vary his
+matter much. Southey's letters, in the two collections by
+his son and his son-in-law, were edited without due regard
+to this: and the third&mdash;those to Caroline Bowles, his
+second wife&mdash;might have been "thinned" in a different
+way. But the bulk of interesting matter is still very large
+and the quality of the presentation is excellent. If anyone
+fears to plunge into some dozen volumes let him look
+at the "Cats" and the "Statues" of Greta Hall, printed
+at the end of the <i>Doctor</i>, but both in form and nature
+letters. He will not hesitate much longer, if he knows
+good letter-stuff when he sees it.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>landor</span></div>
+
+<p>Most of the second group wrote letters worth reading,
+but only one of them reaches the first rank in the art; it
+is true that he is among the first <i>of</i> the first. The letters
+of Landor supply not the least part of that curious problem
+which is presented by his whole work. They naturally
+give less room than the <i>apices</i> of his regular prose and of his
+poetry for that marvellous perfection of style and phrase<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+which is allowed even by those who complain of a want
+of substance in him. And another complaint of his
+"aloofness" affects them in two ways rather damagingly.
+When it is present it cuts at the root of one of the chief
+interests of letters, which is intimacy. When it is absent,
+and Landor presents himself in his well-known character
+of an angry baby (as for instance when he remarked of
+the Bishop who did not do something he wanted, that
+"God alone is great enough for him [Walter Savage
+Landor] to ask anything of <i>twice</i>") he becomes merely&mdash;or
+perhaps to very amiable folk rather painfully&mdash;ridiculous.
+De Quincey and Hazlitt diverted a good deal of
+what might have been utilised as mere letter-writing
+faculty into their very miscellaneous work for publication.
+Moore could write very good letters himself: but is
+perhaps most noted and notable in connection with the
+subject as being one of the earliest and best "Life-and-Letters"
+craftsmen in regard to Byron.</p>
+
+<p>But none of these restrictions or provisos is requisite, or
+could for a moment be thought of, in reference to Charles
+Lamb. Of him, as of hardly any other writer of great
+excellence (perhaps Thackeray is most like him in this
+way) it can be said that if we had nothing but his letters
+we should almost be able to detect the qualities which he
+shows in his regular works. Some of the <i>Essays of Elia</i>
+and his other miscellanies are or pretend to be actual
+letters. Certainly not a few of his letters would seem not
+at all strange and by no means unable to hold up their
+heads, if they had appeared as Essays of that singularly
+fortunate Italian who had his name taken, <i>not</i> in vain
+but in order to be titular author of some of the choicest
+things in literature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Indeed that unique combination of bookishness and
+native fancy which makes the "Eliesque" quality is
+obviously as well suited to the letter as to the essay, and
+would require but a stroke or two of the pen, in addition
+or deletion, to produce examples of either. One often
+feels as if it must have been, as the saying goes, a toss-up
+whether the <i>London Magazine</i> or some personal friend got
+a particular composition; whether it was issued to the
+public direct or waited for Serjeant Talfourd to collect
+and edit it. The two English writers whom, on very
+different sides of course, Lamb most resembles, and whom
+he may be said to have copied (of course as genius copies)
+most, are Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne. But between
+the actual letters and the actual works of these two, themselves,
+there is a great difference, while (as has just been
+noted) in Lamb's case there is none. The reason of course
+is that though Sir Thomas is one of our very greatest
+authors and the Reverend Yorick not by any means
+unplaced in the running for greatness, both are in the
+highest degree artificial: while Lamb's way of writing,
+complex as it is, necessitating as it must have done not a
+little reading and (as would seem almost necessary) not a
+little practice, seems to run as naturally as a child's babble.
+The very tricks&mdash;mechanical dots, dashes, aposiopeses&mdash;which
+offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar
+Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in
+Browne, drop from Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of
+the Fairy story. Unless you are born out of sympathy
+with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at all.
+Now this naturalness&mdash;it can hardly be said too often
+here&mdash;is the one thing needful in letters. The different
+forms of it may be as various and as far apart from each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+other as those of the other Nature in flora or fauna, on
+mountain and sea, in field and town. But if it is there,
+all is right.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>byron</span></div>
+
+<p>There are few more interesting groups in the population
+of our subject than that formed by the three poets whom
+we mentioned last when classifying the epistolers of the
+early nineteenth century. There is hardly one of them who
+has not been ranked by some far from contemptible judgments
+among our greatest as poets; and merely as letter-writers
+they have been put correspondingly high by others
+or the same. It is rather curious that the most contested
+as to his place as a poet has been, as a rule, allowed it most
+easily as a letter-writer. The enormous vogue which
+Byron's verse at once attained both at home and abroad&mdash;has
+at home if not abroad (where reputations of poets often
+depend upon extra-poetical causes) long ceased to be
+undisputed: indeed has chiefly been sustained by spasmodic
+and not too successful exertions of individuals. It
+was never, of course, paralleled in regard to his letters.
+But these letters early obtained high repute and have
+never, in the general estimate, lost it. Some good judges
+even among those who do not care very much for the
+poems, have gone so far as to put him among our very
+best epistolers; and few have put him very much lower.
+Acceptance of the former estimate certainly&mdash;perhaps even
+of the latter&mdash;depends however upon the extent to which
+people can also accept recognition in Byron of the qualities
+of "Sincerity and Strength." That he was always a great
+though often a careless craftsman, and sometimes a great
+artist in literature, nobody possessed of the slightest
+critical ability can deny or doubt. But there are some
+who shake their heads over the attribution of anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+like "sincerity" to him, except very occasionally: and
+who if they had to translate his "strength" into Greek
+would select the word <i>Bia</i> ("violence") and not the word
+<i>Kratos</i> (simple "strength") from the <i>dramatis personae</i>
+of the <i>Prometheus Vinctus</i>. Now "sincerity" of a kind&mdash;even
+of that kind which we found in Walpole and did not
+find in Pope&mdash;has been contended for here as a necessity
+in the best, if not in all good, letters; and "violence" is
+almost fatal to them. Of a certain kind of letter Byron
+was no doubt a skilful practitioner.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> But to some it will
+or may always seem that the vital principle of his correspondence
+is to that of the real "Best" as stage life to
+life off the stage. These two can sometimes approach each
+other marvellously: but they are never the same thing.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>shelley</span></div>
+
+<p>When Mr. Matthew Arnold expressed the opinion that
+Shelley's letters were more valuable than his poetry it
+was, of course, as Lamb said of Coleridge "only his fun."
+In the words of another classic, he "did it to annoy,
+because he knew it teased" some people. The absurdity
+is perhaps best antagonised by the perfectly true remark
+that it only shows that Mr. Arnold understood the letters
+and did not understand the poetry. But it was a little
+unfortunate, not for the poetry but for the letters, against
+which it might create a prejudice. They are so good that
+they ought not to have been made victims of what in
+another person the same judge would have called, and
+rightly, a <i>saugrenu</i><a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> judgment. Like all good letters&mdash;perhaps
+all without exception according to Demetrius and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+Newman&mdash;they carry with them much of their author's
+idiosyncrasy, but in a fashion which should help to correct
+certain misjudgments of that idiosyncrasy itself. Shelley
+<i>is</i> "unearthly," but it is an entire mistake to suppose that
+his unearthliness can never become earthly to such an
+extent as is required. The beginning of <i>The Recollection</i>
+("We wandered to the pine forest") is as vivid a picture
+of actual scenery as ever appeared on the walls of any
+Academy: and <i>The Witch of Atlas</i> itself, not to mention
+the portrait-frescoes in <i>Adonais</i>, is quite a <i>waking</i> dream.
+The quality of liveness is naturally still more prominent
+in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not
+there required to accompany it. But it <i>does</i> accompany
+now and then; and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing
+almost as unlike anything else as the writer's
+poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower) kind hardly less
+perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely
+foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is
+perhaps excessive. But they comment and complete the
+Shelley of the Poems themselves in a manner for which
+we cannot be too thankful.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>keats</span></div>
+
+<p>The letters of Keats did not attract much notice till long
+after those of Byron, and no short time after those of
+Shelley, had secured it. This was by no means wholly,
+though it may have been to some extent indirectly, due to
+the partly stupid and partly malevolent attempts to
+smother his poetical reputation in its cradle. The letters
+were inaccessible till the late Lord Houghton practically
+resuscitated Keats; and till other persons&mdash;rather in the
+"Codlin not Short" manner&mdash;rushed in to correct and
+supplement Mr. Milnes as he then was. And it was even
+much later still before two very different editors, Sir<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+Sidney Colvin and the late Mr. Buxton Forman, completed,
+or nearly so, the publication. Something must be
+said and may be touched on later in connection with a
+very important division of our subject in general, as to
+the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny
+Brawne: but nothing in detail need be written, and it is
+almost needless to say that none of these letters will
+appear here. No one but a brute who is also something
+of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing
+them. A thought of <i>sunt lacrimae rerum</i> is all the price
+that need be paid by any one who chooses to read them,
+nor is it our business to characterise at length the taste
+and wits of the person who could publish them.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p>But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that
+for some years past there has been a tendency to value
+the Letters as a whole very highly. Not only has unusual
+critical power been claimed for Keats on the strength of
+them, but general epistolary merit; and though nobody,
+so far as one knows, has yet paralleled the absurdity above
+mentioned in the case of Shelley, Keats has been taken by
+some credit-worthy judges as an unusually strong witness
+to the truth of the proposition already adopted here, that
+poets are good letter-writers.</p>
+
+<p>He certainly is no exception to the rule; but to what
+exact extent he exemplifies it may not be a matter to be
+settled quite off hand. There is no doubt that at his best
+Keats is excellent in this way, and that best is perhaps to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+be found with greatest certainty, by anyone who wants
+to dip before plunging, in the letters to his brother and
+sister-in-law, George and Georgiana. Those to his little
+sister Fanny are also charming in their way, though the
+peculiar and very happy mixture of life and literature to
+be found in the others does not, of course, occur in them.
+His letters of description, to whomsoever written, are, as
+one might expect, first-rate; and the very late specimen&mdash;one
+of his very last to anyone&mdash;to <i>Mrs.</i> not Miss Brawne
+is as brave as it is touching. As for the criticism, there
+are undoubtedly (as again we should expect from the
+author of the wonderful preface to <i>Endymion</i>) invaluable
+remarks&mdash;the inspiration of poetical practice turned into
+formulas of poetical theory. On the other hand, the
+famous advice to Shelley to "be more of an artist and
+load every rift with ore"&mdash;Shelley whose art transcends
+artistry and whose substance is as the unbroken nugget
+gold, so that there are no rifts in it to load&mdash;is, even when
+one remembers how often poets misunderstand each other,<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a>
+rather "cold water to the back" of admiration.</p>
+
+<p>It may, however, not unfairly introduce a very few
+considerations on the side of Keats's letters which is not
+so good. All but idolaters acknowledge a certain boyishness
+in him&mdash;a boyishness which is in fact no mean source
+contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not
+always quite so charming in prose, and especially in
+letters. You do not want self-criticism of an obviously
+second-thought kind in them. But you do want that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+less obtrusive variety which prevents them from appearing
+unkempt, "down-at-heel" etc. Perhaps there is, at any
+rate in the earlier letters, something of this unkemptness
+in Keats as an epistoler.</p>
+
+<p>A hasty person may say "What! do you venture to
+quarrel with letters where, side by side with agreeable
+miscellaneous details, you may suddenly come upon the
+original and virgin text of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'?"
+Most certainly not. Such a find, or one ten times less
+precious, would make one put up with accompaniments
+much more than ten times worse than the worst of Keats's
+letters. But it may be observed that the objection is only
+a fresh example of the unfortunate tendency<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> of mankind
+to "ignore elenchs" as the logicians say, or, as less
+pedantic phraseology has it, to talk beside the question.
+A man might put a thousand pound note (and you might
+spend many thousand pound notes without buying anything
+like the poem just mentioned) in a coarse, vulgar,
+trivial or in other ways objectionable letter. The note
+would be most welcome in itself, but it would not improve
+the quality of its covering epistle. Not, of course, that
+Keats's letters are coarse or vulgar, though they are sometimes
+rather trivial. But the point is that their excellency,
+<i>as</i> letters, does not depend on their enclosures (as we may
+call them) or even directly on their importance as biography
+which is certainly consummate. Are they good
+letters as such, and of how much goodness? Have they
+been presented as letters should be presented for reading?
+These are points on which, considering the title and range<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+of this Introduction, it may not be improper to offer a few
+observations. We have already ventured to suggest that,
+if not the "be all and end all," at any rate the quality to
+be first enquired into as to its presence or its absence in
+letters, is "naturalness." And we have said something
+as to the propriety or impropriety of different modes of
+editing and publishing them. The present division of the
+subject seems to afford a specially good text for adding
+something more on both these matters.</p>
+
+<p>As to the first point, the text is specially good because
+of the position of Keats in the most remarkable group in
+which we have rather found than placed him. To the
+present writer, as a reader, it seems, as has been already
+said whether justly or unjustly, that the element of
+"naturalness"&mdash;it is an ugly word, and French has no
+better, in fact none at all: though German is a little
+luckier with <i>nat&uuml;rlichkeit</i> and Spanish much with <i>naturaleza</i>&mdash;is
+rather conspicuously deficient in Byron. In Shelley
+it is pre-eminent, and can only be missed by those who
+have no kindred touch of the nature which it reflects.
+Shelley could be vague, unpractical, mystical; he could
+sometimes be just a little silly; but it was no more possible
+for him to be affected, or to make those slips of taste which
+are a sort of <i>minus</i> corresponding to the <i>plus</i> of affectation,
+than it was (after <i>Queen Mab</i> at least) to write anything
+that was not poetry. Thus in addition to the literary
+perfection of his letters, they have the <i>sine qua non</i> of
+naturalness in perfection also.</p>
+
+<p>But with Keats things are different. Opinions differ as
+to whether he ever quite reached maturity even in poetry
+to the extent into which Shelley struck straight with
+<i>Alastor</i>, never losing it afterwards, and leaving us only to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+wonder what conceivable accomplishment might have even
+transcended <i>Adonais</i> and its successors. That with all his
+marvellous promise and hardly less marvellous achievement,
+Keats was only reaching maturity when he died has
+been generally allowed by the saner judgments.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> Now
+<i>im</i>maturity has perhaps its own naturalness which is
+sometimes, and in a way, very charming, but is not the
+naturalness pure and simple of maturity. Children are
+sometimes, nay often, very pretty, agreeable and amusing
+things: but there comes a time when we rather wish they
+would go to the nursery. Perhaps the "sometimes"
+occurs with Keats's earlier letters if not with his later.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>editing of letters</span></div>
+
+<p>He is thus also a text for the second part of our sermon&mdash;the
+duty of editors and publishers of correspondence.
+There is much to be said for the view that publication, as
+it has been put, "is an unpardonable sin," that is to say,
+that no author (or rather no author's ghost) can justly
+complain if what he once deliberately published is, when
+all but the control of the dead hand is off, republished.
+<i>Il l'a voulu</i>, as the famous tag from Moli&egrave;re has it. But
+letters in the stricter sense&mdash;that is to say, pieces of private
+correspondence&mdash;are in very different case. Not only
+were they, save in very few instances, never <i>meant</i> for
+publication: but, which is of even more importance, they
+were never <i>prepared</i> for publication.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> Not only, again,
+did the writer never see them in "proof," much less in
+"revise," as the technical terms go, but he never, so far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+as we know, exercised on them even the revision which
+all but the most careless authors give before sending their
+manuscripts to the printer. Some people of course do
+read over their letters before sending them: but it must
+be very rarely and in special, not to say dubious, cases
+that they do this with a view to the thing being seen by
+any other eyes than those of the intended recipient. It
+is therefore to the last degree unfair to plump letters on
+the market unselected and uncastigated. To what length
+the castigation should proceed is of course matter for
+individual taste and judgment. Nothing must be put in&mdash;that
+is clear; but as to what may or should be left out,
+"there's the rub." Perhaps the best criterion, though it
+may be admitted to be not very easy of application, is
+"Would the author, in publishing, have left it out or not?"
+Sometimes this will pass very violent expressions of opinion
+and even sentiments of doubtful morality and wisdom.
+But that it should invariably exclude mere trivialities,
+faults of taste, slovenlinesses of expression, etc., is at least
+the opinion of the present writer. And a "safety razor"
+of such things might perhaps with advantage have been
+used on Keats's, though he has written nothing which is
+in the least discreditable to him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span></p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. LATER</h3>
+
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>a nineteenth century group</span></div>
+
+<p>Part at least of these general remarks has a very special
+relevance to the rest of our story. There may be differences
+of respectable opinion as to the system of editing
+just advocated; but they will hardly concern one point&mdash;that
+the susceptibilities of living persons must be considered.
+To some extent indeed this is a mere counsel of
+selfish prudence: for an editor who neglects it may get
+himself into serious difficulties. Even where such danger
+does not exist, or might perhaps be disregarded, it is
+impossible for any decent person to run the risk of needlessly
+offending others. It will be seen at once that this
+introduces a new matter for consideration in regard to
+most&mdash;practically all&mdash;of the correspondences which we
+have still to survey. Even those just discussed have only
+recently passed from under its range. Shelley's son died
+not so very long ago: grandchildren of Byron much more
+recently; and if Keats had lived to the ordinary age of
+man and had, as he very likely would have done, married
+not Fanny Brawne, but somebody else later, a son or
+daughter of his (daughters are particularly and sometimes
+inconveniently loyal to their deceased parents) might be
+alive and flourishing now. As this constraint extends not
+merely to the families of the writers but to those of persons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+mentioned by them (not to speak of these persons themselves
+in the most recent cases), it exercises, as will at once
+be seen, a most wide-ranging cramp and brake upon publication.
+Blunders are occasionally made of course: the
+most remarkable in recent times was probably an oversight
+of the editor of Edward FitzGerald's letters, than
+which hardly any more interesting exist among those yet
+to be noticed. FitzGerald, quite innocently and without
+the slightest personal malevolence but thinking only of
+Mrs. Browning's work, had expressed himself (as anybody
+might in a private letter) to the effect that perhaps we
+need not be sorry for her death. Unfortunately the letter
+was published while her husband was still alive: and
+many people must remember the very natural and excusable,
+but somewhat excessive and undignified, explosion
+which followed on his part.</p>
+
+<p>Such things must of course be avoided at all costs; and
+the consequence is that nineteenth century letters must
+frequently&mdash;in fact with rare if any exceptions&mdash;have
+appeared in a condition of expurgation which cannot but
+have affected their spirit and savour to a very considerable
+extent. It is for instance understood that Mr. Matthew
+Arnold's were very severely censored; and, while readily
+believing this and acquiescing in its probable propriety,
+the old Adam in some readers may be unable to refrain
+from regret.</p>
+
+<p>Again, there is something to be said about the less good
+effects of that "Life-and-Letters" system which has been
+quite rightly welcomed and praised for its better ones.
+Drawing on the Letters&mdash;with good material to work on
+and good skill in the worker&mdash;improves the Life enormously;
+but it is by no means certain&mdash;indeed it has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+been hinted already&mdash;that the Letters themselves do not
+to a certain extent lose by it. Indeed from one point of
+view, the word "loss" may be used in its most literal
+meaning. The compiler of one very famous biography
+was said, for instance, to have&mdash;with a disregard of the
+value of letters as autographs which was magnificent perhaps
+in one way but far from "the game" in others&mdash;cut
+up the actual sheets and pasted the pieces on his manuscript,
+sending the whole to the printers and chancing the
+survival even of what was sent, when it came back with
+the proofs.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another sense of "loss" which has also to
+be reckoned. The framework of biography is, or at least
+ought to be, something more than a mere frame: and it
+distracts attention from the letters themselves, breaks up
+their continuous effect, and in many cases necessitates at
+least occasional omission of parts which an editor of them
+by themselves would not think of excluding. Of course
+this is no argument against the plan as such: but it
+has, together with what was said recently, to be taken
+into account when we compare the epistolary position
+of the last century with that of its immediate
+predecessor.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>
+
+<p>These remarks are made not in the least by way of
+depreciating or even making an apology for nineteenth
+century letters, but only in order to put the reader in a
+proper state for critical estimation of them. Nor is it
+necessary to repeat&mdash;still less to discuss&mdash;the more general
+lamentations with some reference to which we started as
+to any decay of letter-writing. Provisos and warnings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+may be taken as having been made sufficiently: and we
+pass to the actual survey.</p>
+
+<p>It may have been noticed in reference to the principal
+group of letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the
+exception of Cowper, they were all acquainted with each
+other. Walpole knew Lady Mary, Chesterfield and Gray;
+while Gray, if he did not know the other two, knew
+Walpole very well indeed. Something of the same sort
+might be contended for among those whom we have
+selected on the bridge of the eighteenth and nineteenth.
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Lamb were of course
+intimately connected: Southey knew Landor and Shelley,
+Keats knew Shelley, Wordsworth and Lamb; while Byron
+and Shelley, however unequally, were pretty closely yoked
+together. It is not meant that in all these groups everybody
+wrote to each other; but that the writing faculty
+was curiously prominent&mdash;diffused like a kind of atmosphere&mdash;in
+all. Now if we look in the nineteenth for such
+a group it will be found perhaps less readily. But one
+such at least certainly exists, to wit that which includes
+Tennyson, Thackeray, Edward FitzGerald, Carlyle and
+his wife, Fanny Kemble, Sterling and one or two more.
+There are of course numerous others outside this group,
+and even in it Tennyson himself is not a very remarkable
+letter-writer, any more than his great rival, Browning,
+was. But there was the same diffusion of the letter-writing
+spirit which has been noticed above, and
+Thackeray, FitzGerald, the Carlyles, and perhaps Fanny
+Kemble are quite of the greater clans among our peculiar
+people.</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable of all these&mdash;and as it seems to
+the present writer, one of the most remarkable of all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+English letter-writers is one whose letters have never been
+collected,<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> and from whom, until comparatively lately,
+we had only few and as it were accidental specimens. It
+is hoped that, notwithstanding the great changes of taste
+recently as to reticence or indiscretion, there are still many
+people who can not only understand but thoroughly
+sympathise with Thackeray's disgust at the idea of having
+his "Life" written; and the even greater reluctance
+which he would certainly have felt at that of having his
+letters published. But, as has been suggested on a former
+occasion, when things <i>are</i> published there is nothing disgraceful
+in reading them: and it may be frankly admitted
+that lovers of English literature would have missed much
+pleasure and the opportunity of much admiration if the
+"Brookfield" letters, those to the Baxter family and
+others in America, those finally included in the "Biographical"
+edition, and yet others which have turned up
+sporadically had remained unknown. It may be doubted
+whether there is anything like them in our literature&mdash;if
+indeed there is in any other&mdash;for the double, treble or even
+more complicated gift of view into character, matter of
+interest, positive literary satisfaction, and (perhaps most
+remarkable of all) resemblance to and explanation of the
+author's "regular literature," as it has been called. In
+some respects they resemble the letters of Keats; but there
+is absent from them the immaturity which was noted in
+those, and which extended to both matter and style.
+They are more various in subject and tone than Shelley's.
+They are not deliberately quaint like Lamb's; and they
+naturally lack (whether this is wholly an advantage or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+not, may admit, though not here, of dispute) the restraint<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a>
+which, in greater or less degree and in varied kind, characterizes
+the great eighteenth century epistolers.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>thackeray</span></div>
+
+<p>One additional charm which many of them possess may
+be regarded by extreme precisians as of doubtful legitimacy
+as far as comment here is concerned: but this may
+be ruled out as a superfluous scruple. It is the illumination
+of the text "by the author's own candles" as he himself
+says in a well-known Introduction: the actual "illustration"
+by insertion in the script, of little pen-drawings.
+The shortcomings of Thackeray's draughtsmanship have
+always been admitted: and by nobody more frankly
+than by himself. But they hardly affect this sort of
+"picturing" at all. The unfortunate inability to depict
+a pretty face which he deplored need do no harm whatever:
+and his lack of "composition" not much. A spice
+of caricature is almost invariably admissible in such
+things: and the same tricksy spirit which prompted the
+hundreds of initials, <i>culs-de-lampe</i> etc. contributed by
+him to <i>Punch</i> and to be found collected in the "Oxford"
+edition of his works, was most happily at hand for use in
+letters. Some years ago there appeared, in a catalogue of
+autographs for sale, an extract of text and cut which was
+irresistibly funny. The author and designer had had a
+mishap by slipping on that peculiarly treacherous suddenly
+frozen rain for which (though we are liable enough
+to it in England and though some living have seen the
+entire Strand turned into one huge pantomime scene,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+roars of laughter included, as people came out of theatres)
+we have no special name. (The French, in whose capital
+it is said to be even more frequent, call it <i>verglas</i>.) In
+telling it he had drawn himself sitting (as involuntarily
+though one hopes not so eternally as <i>infelix Theseus</i>)
+with arms, legs, hat, etcetera in disorder suitable to
+the occasion and with a facial expression of the most
+ludicrous dismay. It can hardly have taken a dozen
+strokes of the pen: but they simply glorified the letter.</p>
+
+<p>In no sense, however, can the value and delight of
+Thackeray's letters be said to depend upon this <i>bonus</i> of
+illustration. Without it they would be among the most
+noteworthy and the most delectable of their kind. One
+sees in them the "first state" of that extraordinary
+glancing at all sorts of side-views, possible objections and
+comments on "what the other fellow thinks," which is
+the main secret in his published writings. If the view of
+him as a "sentimentalist" (which nobody, unless it is
+taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened
+by them, that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed
+so long, of his "cynicism" is utterly destroyed.
+We see the variety of his interests; the keenness of his
+sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity of the
+changes in his mood and thought. And through the whole
+there runs the wonderful style which was so long unrecognised&mdash;nay,
+which those who go by the trumpery machine-made
+rules of "composition books" used gravely to
+stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many
+(though not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication
+which have been discussed and advocated above: and it
+will probably be possible some day for posterity to possess,
+not only a collected body of the now scattered Thackeray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever
+appeared even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an
+addition to our Epistolary Library which can bear comparison
+with any previous occupant of those shelves: and
+one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar sense,
+the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For
+it will be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of
+its author's own&mdash;a <i>William Makepeace Thackeray</i> in the
+familiar novel-form of title, and in the old Richardsonian
+form of contents&mdash;but oh! how different from anything
+of Richardson's save that it might possibly make you hang
+yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but
+because you had come to the end of it.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>fitzgerald</span></div>
+
+<p>If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less
+complete presentation, already existing, of nineteenth
+century "Letters" in a body by a single writer, the palm
+must probably be given to those (already referred to) of
+the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayy&agrave;m. Besides
+their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy,
+they have, for anyone studying the subject as we are
+endeavouring to do, a curious attraction of comparison.
+Letter-writing, though by no means exclusively, would
+appear to be specially and peculiarly the <i>forte</i> of men who
+live somewhat special and peculiar lives&mdash;men without
+the ordinary family ties of wife and children&mdash;sometimes
+though by no means always, recluses; possibly to some
+extent "originals," "humourists," "eccentrics," as they
+have been called at different times and from different
+points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society,
+belongs to the class after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+and Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later
+period Lamb, are eminently of it. But hardly anyone so
+unquestionably comes under the classification as Edward
+FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time married, but
+that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it
+was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual
+cohabitation lasted but a short time. He had no children,
+and though he frequently foregathered with the family
+from which he sprang, he was essentially a "solitary."
+Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise
+themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and
+Senancour and the author of <i>Jacopo Ortis</i>, naturally enough
+find in letters the outlet for communication with their
+fellows<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> which others find in conversation, and the occupation
+which those others have ready-made, in society,
+business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent
+letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have
+been extremely busy, and "family men" of the most
+unblemished character, merely shows that the rule is not
+universal. But it may be observed that their letters
+usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work,
+few men have had more than the author of <i>Euphranor</i>
+and (as we have had to say before) the "translator or
+paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of Spanish and
+Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in
+this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his
+genius most strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+disputed question how much is Omar and how much
+FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly be extended
+by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon
+in his versions of those masters: but it does not concern
+us here. What does concern us is the fact that he has
+contrived to make his most famous exercise in translation
+signally, and the others to some extent, not dead "versions,"
+but as it were reincarnations of the original, the
+spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his
+own, or both being blended of his and the author's. To
+do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the
+equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald's
+own type<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> used that term. It shows in his
+scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps
+more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied
+the history of the English Universities in connection with
+that of English literature knows, even if he has not been
+fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable fashion
+in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford
+and Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost
+magical influence over a generation (hardly more) of
+undergraduates. There was unmistakably such an <i>aura</i>
+or atmosphere about in Trinity College, Cambridge, during
+the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties of the
+nineteenth century&mdash;a spirit of literature and humour, of
+seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical
+poetry&mdash;which produced things as diverse as <i>The Dying
+Swan</i> and Clarke's <i>Library of Useless Knowledge</i>, <i>Vanity
+Fair</i> and the English <i>Rubaiy&agrave;t</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Of this curiously blended mood-combination&mdash;of which
+in their different ways Tennyson and Thackeray, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+universally known, Brookfield, W. B. Donne, G. S. Venables,
+as less known, but noteworthy instances suggest themselves
+as examples&mdash;FitzGerald was certainly not the least
+remarkable. He had, as eccentrics usually and almost
+necessarily have, not a few limitations, some of which
+possibly were, though others certainly were not, deliberately
+assumed or accepted. He would not allow that
+Tennyson had ever in his later work (not latest by any
+means) done anything so good as his earlier. In that
+unlucky though quite blameless observation on Mrs.
+Browning which was referred to above, he ignored or
+showed himself unable to appreciate the fact that the
+poetess had never done anything better than, if anything
+so good as, some of her very latest work.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> It cannot be
+considered an entirely adequate cause for ceasing to live
+with your wife,<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> that her dresses rustle; and many other
+instances of what may be called practical and literary
+<i>non-sequiturs</i> might be alleged against him. But all these
+"queernesses" are evidence of a temperament and a mode
+of thinking which are likely to produce very satisfactory
+letters. They are sure not to be dull: and when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+queerness is accompanied by such literary power as "Fitz"
+possessed they are not likely to be merely silly, as some
+things are which attempt not to be dull. As a matter of
+fact they are delightful: and their variety is astonishing.
+Odd stories and odd experiences seem, despite his almost
+claustral life, to have had a habit of flying to FitzGerald
+like filings to a magnet&mdash;as for instance the irresistible
+anecdote of the parish clerk who insisted on giving out
+for singing casual remarks of the parson above him as if
+they were verses of a hymn, and who was duly echoed by
+the congregation. Even when he does not make you
+laugh he satisfies you: even when you do not agree
+with him you are obliged to him for having expressed
+his heresy.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>fanny kemble</span></div>
+
+<p>One of FitzGerald's special correspondents was, for
+reasons then imperative, not a member of the Cambridge
+group itself, but as closely connected with it as possible:
+being the sister of one of its actual members. John M.
+Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon scholars
+in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so
+far as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though
+he showed these neither in letter writing nor in the direction
+which Tennyson incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet
+to J. M. K." His sister Frances (invariably, like most
+though by no means all ladies of her name, called
+"Fanny"<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a>) was a very remarkable person indeed.
+After taking early and with brilliant success to the stage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+which might almost be said to be hers by inheritance,<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> she
+married an American planter with even worse results (they
+were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald's
+marriage brought about later: and for many years returned
+to public life, not as an actress but as a reader.
+She wrote and published both prose and verse of various
+kinds: but her best known work and that which places
+her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much
+of which is composed of actual letters, while practically the
+whole of it is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has
+perhaps been published <i>too</i> voluminously: and it is certain
+that, as indeed one might expect, its parts are not equal in
+interest. But experienced and balanced judgment must
+always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and
+even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps
+never quite happily or fully developed. Merely as a
+person she seems to have exercised an extraordinary
+attraction without being exactly amiable<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>: and from the
+intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have nothing
+here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what
+has sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated,"
+"not brought off," etc., but of extraordinary
+capacity.</p>
+
+<p>This may have had something to do with her sudden and
+exceptional success, when at barely twenty, and with no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+training except what heredity might give her, she "took
+the town [and the country] by storm" as Juliet, and very
+soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her
+"records" of these and other things are of almost the first
+quality: and this power of "recording" continued and
+was perhaps stimulated by the less as well as the more
+fortunate events of her life. It may be said indeed
+that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five
+and twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still
+more unusual wits, had no business to marry a planter in
+the Southern States, knowing that she was to live there,
+unless she had reconciled herself to the institution of
+slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this.
+But the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave
+occasion to some very remarkable "recording," and the
+same had been the case earlier with her life, whether at
+home, on the stage, or in society, and was the case later
+whether she lived in England, in the Northern States, or
+on the Continent of Europe. Perhaps you never exactly
+like her: an unusual experience in the reading of letters,
+which for the most part are singularly reconciling from the
+mere fact of their explanatory quality. There is indeed
+no better confirmation of the well-known French saying
+<i>tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner</i>. Here, however, there
+are, as elsewhere, exceptions&mdash;Gray being perhaps one<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a>
+as our present subject is another. But there are few
+things more interesting, though their interest may be somewhat
+tragic, than the spectacle of the way "things go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+wrong" so easily, so finally, so fatally. Fanny Kemble
+had a sister Adelaide, afterwards Mrs. Sartoris, with whom
+everything appears to have gone right: but with herself it
+"seemed otherwise to the Gods." And her letters or
+memoirs, or whatever they are to be called, are the record
+thereof, as well as of other things.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>the carlyles</span></div>
+
+<p>The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband
+and wife, according to the inevitable misfortune attending
+so much of our subject&mdash;supplied the occasion of volumes
+of that disgusting and most idle controversy which has
+made many people of taste pray that nothing biographical
+may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to
+take part in a game which if it does not always, like the
+unpleasant personage in the old ballad,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Come for ill and never for good,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the
+latter purpose and result. <i>Sunt lacrimae rerum</i> is&mdash;once
+more and as so often&mdash;the best and the sufficient observation.
+But there remains in the letters of both, and
+especially in those of the lady, plenty of wholesome
+interest and of justifiable&mdash;not spying or eavesdropping&mdash;information
+as to character. Judged comparatively, they
+certainly do not contradict the notion formerly referred
+to, that in some respects letter-writing is a specially
+feminine gift. Carlyle's own letters<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> have plenty of merit
+and attraction&mdash;some of the descriptive ones especially:
+and they demonstrate, in the infallible way which letters
+and letters alone can supply in the absence of long personal
+familiarity, that the general tone and key of his writings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+was no falsetto but a perfectly genuine thing&mdash;that
+the often urged contrast of the <i>Life of Schiller</i>, instead of
+evidencing affectation in the later work, only proves
+constraint in the earlier. At the same time, except for
+what may be called side-illustration of the works, and
+completion of the biography for those who want it, there
+is not very much in Carlyle's letters which would be a
+serious loss.</p>
+
+<p>With his wife the case is different. Without her
+"Letters and Memorials" we might (it is rather improbable
+that we <i>should</i>, owing to the misdemeanours of
+more persons than one and the blow-fly appetite of a part
+of the public for sore places) have escaped a good deal of
+the ignoble wrangling above referred to. But we should
+not only have failed to appreciate a very remarkable
+character, but have missed some of the very best of our
+now existing contributions to epistolary literature.
+Personally Mrs. Carlyle was by no means a general
+favourite. She had a fearfully sharp tongue, and a still
+sharper wit in directing it upon her victims; her experiences
+were not very likely to edulcorate her acids and
+mollify her asperities. The letters show that, as so often
+happens, there was plenty of sweetness within the sharp
+exterior, and that her strength was the strength of passion,
+not of obduracy. But this is not all. There might have
+been biographical whitewashing of this kind without much
+gain to pure literature. But the letters showed likewise
+a power of expression, both lighter and more serious,
+which is hardly inferior to that found in any correspondence
+of man or woman, genuine or fictitious. Some people,
+not given to rash superlatives and pretty extensively
+acquainted with literature, have held that the letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+describing her visit after many years to Haddington, and
+the reminiscences it called forth, has no superior in the
+vast range of our subject for pure pathos perfectly
+expressed, without constraint on nature yet without loss
+of dignity.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> On the other hand, the half comic accounts
+of her domestic troubles etc. are worthy of Fielding or
+Thackeray. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle possessed what
+is rare in women&mdash;humour. And she exemplified, as
+few other women and not so very many men have done,
+Anne Evans's matchless definition of it as "thinking in
+jest while feeling in earnest." Moreover while, as all true
+humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when
+necessary, she could, as is the case with them likewise,
+never quite discard the earnest.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>macaulay and dickens</span></div>
+
+<p>Some of the most distinguished of Carlyle's contemporaries,
+the great men of letters of the mid-nineteenth
+century, have left letters more or less copious and more or
+less valuable from one or both of the two sides, biographical
+and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay's letters
+and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been
+excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the
+rather boisterous "cocksureness" of the published writings:
+and help his few but very remarkable poems other
+than the <i>Lays</i> (which are excellent but in a different kind)
+to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his
+mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically
+very capital. So also in Dickens's case the "Life-and-Letters"
+system is excellently justified, but one does not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+know that the letters in themselves would always deserve
+a first class in this particular school of <i>Literae Humaniores</i>.
+Letter-writing admits&mdash;if it may not even require&mdash;a
+certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French
+call an <i>Egoisme &agrave; plusieurs</i>&mdash;a temper which takes, if only
+for the moment, other people into itself and cares for them
+there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too generally
+thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fictitious
+creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr.
+Toots, he could have written some letters to or from <i>them</i>
+it would have been a very different thing. In this respect
+he does not, as in others he does, resemble Balzac, whose
+egotism was in a way as intense as his own and like it
+extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while
+the contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in
+other cases from this same point of view. At the same
+time it must not be supposed that there is any intention
+here of belittling Dickens, either as a letter-writer or in any
+other way. It is only suggested that he lacks one of the
+things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his
+most noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial
+criticisms&mdash;rather limited in taste and purview, but
+singularly shrewd within other limits. And many of the
+others tell their substance with that faculty of "telling"
+which he possessed as few have ever done, while the
+comedy of those given here is "the true Dickens."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>some novelists</span></div>
+
+<p>Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and
+French) of the mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests
+the rest of a class so predominant in that century's literary
+production. Their record in the matter is rather
+chequered, for reasons, in some respects and cases at any
+rate, not difficult to discover. Reference is elsewhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+made to the disappointment experienced (perhaps not too
+reasonably) by some readers of the letters of George Eliot.
+A not dissimilar feeling had been expressed earlier in
+regard to those of Miss Austen: which, however, were
+intrinsically far superior. Except to her sister, and it
+may be even to her, Jane Austen was not at all likely to
+indulge in what is called in French <i>&eacute;panchement</i>: it was not
+in the least her line, whether in writing for publication or
+otherwise. Only one full year passed between the death
+of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and the two
+illustrated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably
+accurate idea that when one human being dies another is
+born to succeed him or her in their special functions.
+But, as in other respects, they differed here remarkably;
+and though in neither case was the nature of the writer
+exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very
+differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if
+she had chosen, (she has done something like it as it is)
+have written most delightful letters. A hundred scenes
+in the novels from Catherine Morland's tremors and trials,
+or John Dashwood's progressive limitations of generosity
+for his sisters, to some of the best things in <i>Persuasion</i>,
+would take letter form with the happiest results. But she
+did not choose that it should be so. George Eliot, on the
+other hand, after her earlier days, had ensconced herself in
+such a chrysalis of quasi-philosophical and quasi-scientific
+thought and speech that she could hardly have recovered
+the freedom of expression which is almost the soul of
+letter-writing.</p>
+
+<p>Some of Bulwer's (the first Lord Lytton's) letters are
+remarkable in ways, especially that of literary criticism,
+which might hardly be expected by anyone who had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+insufficiently taken the measure of his strangely unequal
+and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as the
+century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the
+enormous professional production which began to be
+customary with novelists&mdash;principally tempted no doubt
+by the corresponding gain of money, but perhaps also by
+the nobler desire of increasing, or at least living up to, their
+reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery which,
+it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a
+time, to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving
+and talking to morning callers, the production of three or
+four novels a year&mdash;and those not the cock-boats we often
+see now but attempts at least at "the old three-decker"
+in its fullest dimensions&mdash;could leave little time or inclination
+for extensive letter-writing. There were, however,
+some exceptions. Charles Kingsley&mdash;who, though his
+novels were not very numerous, supplemented them with
+all sorts of miscellaneous writing for publication, was a
+diligent sportsman, an active cleric, and a busy man in
+many kinds and ways&mdash;wrote certainly good and probably
+many letters. The two brighter stars in the Bront&euml; constellation,
+especially Charlotte, were scarcely less remarkable
+with the pen in this way than in others: and Mrs.
+Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, has been put high by
+some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade
+showed itself here as elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a>: and others might be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+mentioned.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> But perhaps the most distinguished novelist
+next to Thackeray of the nineteenth century, who was
+also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who died
+in middle age not long before its end&mdash;Robert Louis
+Stevenson.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>stevenson</span></div>
+
+<p>Stevenson had in fact practically all the qualifications
+necessary for a good practitioner of our art. He had,
+eminently, that gift which the Romans called <i>facundia</i>
+and the French can translate, if with a slight degradation
+of meaning, by <i>faconde</i>; but for which we, though the
+adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess
+no noun, "Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine"
+writing or speaking. "Facility of expression" perhaps
+comes nearest. Whether he corrected or corrupted this
+native gift by his famous "sedulous aping" of stylists
+before him is a debated question: but one quite unnecessary
+to touch here. It is sufficient to say that he
+never aped anyone in his letters, unless playfully and in a
+sort of concert with his correspondent. Indeed he
+possessed, quintessentially, that "naturalness" of matter
+and form on which so much stress has been laid. He had
+a disposition equally favourable to the business&mdash;if
+business we may call it. A person who is habitually
+gloomy may write capital letters of an impressive character
+now and then: but is likely to produce little but
+boredom if he extends his practice. Louis Stevenson did
+not habitually "regard the world through a horse collar"
+(as it was once put), but he certainly did not pass through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his
+eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes
+under no small difficulties, he had very little if any of that
+<i>collar</i>-work&mdash;that grinding "in Gaza at the mill with
+slaves" which takes the spring out of all but the springsomest
+of men. He had widely varied experience of
+scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of
+books without being in the least bookish; had, as the old
+saying goes, "wit at will," and, though he never made
+deliberate and affected efforts to <i>get</i> out of ruts, <i>kept</i> out
+of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a
+"poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there
+was not a drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things
+could not make a good letter-writer nothing could; and
+there is little doubt that he will hold his place as such as
+long as English literature lasts. It is a great pleasure to
+me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his
+to myself as a sort of <i>bonus</i> to the reader of this little book&mdash;a
+letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other
+respects.</p>
+
+<p>At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed
+had best, stop: not merely because space is closing in.
+Lovers of letters will of course detect what seem to them
+omissions in what has gone before and what comes after.
+Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
+Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon
+and Newman&mdash;the latter not merely for his re-statement
+of the character-value of correspondence, but for his
+exemplifications of it&mdash;might certainly have been more
+fully noticed. But in regard to later writers there are
+several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be
+easy to speak on account of their own lives being too<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+recent: in regard of nearly all the same fact must have
+occasioned exercise of "censorship" to a degree which
+makes absolute judgment of their competence as epistolers
+rash, and comparative judgment almost impossible. To
+take up once more one example of men who were born a
+full or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> speaking
+apparently with intimate knowledge of the originals,
+speaks also of the "severe process of excision and retrenchment
+to which these [<i>the letters of Mr. Matthew Arnold</i>]
+have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters
+"could have endured" it. Those who remember the
+appearance of these letters will also remember that some
+critics doubted whether even "these" had exactly
+"endured it"&mdash;that is to say, whether the expected salt
+of the author of so much published <i>persiflage</i> had not been
+left out or had singularly lost its savour. To take another
+from the next generation, it is pretty certain that Mr.
+Swinburne's letters, though we have judicious selections
+from them, must have needed much more excision or
+retrenchment than Mr. Arnold's, unless he wrote them in
+a manner remarkably different both from his conversation
+and from his published works. In such cases it is best,
+the evidence being not fully before us, not to anticipate
+either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h3>SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER</h3>
+
+
+<p>A few more general remarks, however, on <i>kinds</i> of letter-writing&mdash;as
+distinguished from personality and accomplishment
+of letter-writers&mdash;may not improperly be added.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>letters and the novel</span></div>
+
+<p>One extremely curious application of the Letter has not
+yet been noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is
+the way in which&mdash;when after birth-struggles for some
+two thousand years the novel at last got itself born&mdash;letter-writing
+was pressed into its service. Historically,
+as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may
+connect Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest
+the connection as the origin of the "novel-in-letters." In
+the romance proper&mdash;that is to say that of the Middle Ages&mdash;letters
+do not play any very important part, just as they
+played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the
+late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries
+they play a much larger&mdash;partly no doubt because of
+the influence (here noted) of the Greek Romance itself,
+but more because of the increased frequency and importance
+of actual correspondence in life and society. We
+need not, however, attribute too much to this influence of
+imitation in seeking for the cause or causes which made
+Richardson adopt the form: nor need we even put down
+to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well as at home,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+the very general further adoption and continuance of a
+form which has perhaps more to be said against it than for
+it. Most serious students of the history of prose fiction
+must have noticed, and some of them have already pointed
+out, the curious, rather na&iuml;f, but quite obvious feeling on
+the part of the earlier practitioners of such fiction that
+somebody might ask them, in more polite language than
+that in which Cardinal Ippolito d'Este asked Ariosto a
+similar question, "Where they got their stories from?"
+The feeling seems sometimes to have affected poets, but
+much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and
+confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination.
+Of the unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices
+invented to answer this inconvenient question Scott in
+one well-known passage,<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> and others elsewhere, have made
+ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of Miss
+Austen's satiric touches is the passage where Catherine
+Morland expects palpitating interest from a bundle of
+washing-bills in a wardrobe-cupboard. But the anticipation
+of such a question, though perhaps it became conventional
+before it disappeared altogether, was certainly at
+one time real.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson&mdash;Father
+of English novels as he is with whatever justice
+called&mdash;and by that overmastering fancy for letter-writing
+itself, which, as should have been already made clear,
+affected the century in which English novels were born&mdash;the
+practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was
+too perfect an artist in the higher and purer kind of fiction
+to favour it: and though Sterne himself was a sufficiently
+characteristic letter-writer, the form would not have suited<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But Smollett's
+best, <i>Humphrey Clinker</i>, adopts the method, and is perhaps
+one of its most successful examples. It suited the author's
+preference for a succession of scenes rather than a connected
+plot; for the sharp presentation of "humours"
+in character and incident. And it continued to be
+practised both early in the nineteenth century&mdash;examples
+had swarmed at the end of the eighteenth&mdash;and later.
+<i>Redgauntlet</i> (which some have thought one of the best of
+Scott's novels and which few good judges would put much
+lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not wholly.
+And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters
+and narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale.
+It is a sort of confession of what certainly is the fact&mdash;that
+the novel entirely by letters is a clumsy device,
+constantly getting in the way of the "story." Indeed the
+method of <i>Redgauntlet</i> is a kind of retreat to the elder and
+more modern&mdash;one may say the more artistic and rational&mdash;plan
+of <i>introducing</i> letters, but only occasionally as
+auxiliaries to, and as it were illustrations of, the actual
+narrative, not as substitutes for, or at any rate main
+constituents of, it.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> Indeed, in order to make a novel
+wholly composed of letters thoroughly and absorbingly
+attractive, either charm of style such as to make the kind
+of literature in which it appears, more or less indifferent;
+or passion which is more suitable to poetry or drama than
+to prose; or both, may seem unnecessary.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>letters and biography</span></div>
+
+<p>It was also in the eighteenth century&mdash;<i>the</i> century once
+more of letter-writing&mdash;that letters, this time genuine not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+fictitious, began to play, to an important extent, a subsidiary
+part in yet another department of literature&mdash;biography.
+They had always done so, of course, to an
+extent less important in History, of which Biography is
+really a subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum
+of the pseudo-Demetrius quoted above as to the illuminative
+power of letters on character could be missed by no
+historian and by no biographer who had his wits about
+him&mdash;even if he had less striking examples at hand than that
+letter of the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one
+of the Tacitean flashes of lightning through the dark of
+history. But the credit of using letters as a main constituent
+of biography&mdash;of originating the "Life-and-Letters"
+class of books which fills so large a part of modern
+library-shelves&mdash;has been given, as far as English is
+concerned, to Mason in his dealings with Gray. There
+is so little to be said in favour of Mason, that we need not
+enquire too narrowly into his right to this commendation:
+though critical conscience must be appeased by adding
+that he abused his privilege as an editor and "literary
+executor" by garbling unblushingly. Boswell did Mason
+honour by acknowledging his example, and much more
+also by following it; and this practically settled the
+matter. Except in short pieces, which had need be of
+special excellence like Carlyle's <i>Sterling</i>, the plan has
+always been followed since: and there can here at least
+be no question that with a little favour of circumstances,
+it is the best plan possible. You get, as has been said,
+your character at first hand; if the letters include epistles
+to as well as from him or her, you get invaluable side-lights;
+you get, except in cases of wilful deception or
+great carelessness, the most trustworthy accounts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the
+man talking.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time it must be admitted that this "Life-and-Letters"
+scheme, like every kind of art, requires care:
+and like most human things, is exposed to dangers and
+difficulties in addition to some previously noticed. To
+begin with, the <i>quality</i> of the letters has to be considered.
+It so happened that Mason, the originator by courtesy,
+had unusually good material to work with. Gray, as is
+above pointed out and as is also, with some provisos
+already made or very soon to be made, universally admitted,
+is one of our best letter-writers. But not everybody&mdash;not
+every considerable man or woman of letters
+even&mdash;can write good letters.</p>
+
+<p>And besides this&mdash;besides the temptation to rely on the
+letters and merely to print them whether they deserve it
+or not&mdash;there is the further difficulty&mdash;to judge by the
+scarcity of good biographies a very great and insistent one&mdash;of
+composing the framework of the biography itself so
+as to suit the letters&mdash;to give the apples of gold in a picture
+not too obviously composed of some metal baser than
+silver. Unless this is done it would be better simply to
+"calendar" the letters themselves, with the barest
+schedule of dates and facts to assist the comprehension of
+them. But to consider the different methods of doing
+this&mdash;still more of presenting letters apart from deliberate
+biographical intention&mdash;would lead us too far. Carlyle's
+<i>Cromwell</i>&mdash;the presentation of an extraordinarily difficult
+set of documents not merely with connecting narrative,
+but with a complete explanatory commentary including
+paraphrase, is as remarkable an achievement as, and a
+far more elaborate one than, his <i>Sterling</i> in the way of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+biography pure and simple. It is perhaps, though less
+delectable, not less admirable in its style than the other
+in its own. But it has, of course, the drawback of carrying
+with it a distinctly controversial character and, indeed,
+intention. We have more recently had at least two
+examples of the fullest possible comment with the least
+possible controversy in Mr. Tovey's "Gray," and of less
+voluminous but excellently adequate editing in Mrs.
+Toynbee's "Walpole."</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>"letters from unknowns"</span></div>
+
+<p>One not very large, but extremely curious division of
+letter-writing closely connected with those most recently
+mentioned, invites if it does not insist upon a word or two.
+Many people&mdash;almost all who have happened to be at any
+time "in the lime-light" as a modern phrase goes&mdash;that
+is to say in positions of publicity&mdash;must have had experience
+of the strange appetite of their fellow-creatures
+for writing them letters without previous acquaintance,
+without excuse of introduction, and on the most flimsy
+pretexts of occasion. The present writer once received
+from Australia a long list of queries on a book of his&mdash;most
+if not all of which could have been answered from
+the ordinary reference-bookshelf in the writing-room of
+such a club as that&mdash;never mind whether it was in Sydney
+or Melbourne or Adelaide&mdash;from which the querist dated
+his epistle. Indeed, on another occasion somebody
+demanded a catalogue of "the important references to the
+medical profession in French literature"! This tendency
+of humanity sometimes exercises and magnifies itself into
+really remarkable correspondences. There is perhaps none
+such in English quite to match those <i>Lettres &agrave; une Inconnue</i>
+which (after standing the brunt of not a little unfavourable
+criticism, provoked not so much by their contents as by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+the personal, political, and above all religious or anti-religious
+idiosyncrasy of their author, Prosper M&eacute;rim&eacute;e)
+have taken their place, for good and all, among the
+classics of the art. Our most curious example perhaps is
+to be found in the <i>Letters of the Duke of Wellington to
+Miss J.</i>, the genuineness of which has been a matter of
+some controversy, but which are rather more inexplicable
+as forgeries than as authentic documents. Authors, from
+Richardson onwards, have been the special targets of
+such correspondents: and romance reports some, perhaps
+even history might accept a few, instances of the closest
+relations resulting. On the other hand, one of the very
+best of Miss Edgeworth's too much neglected stories,
+"L'Amie Inconnue" not only may be useful as a warning
+to the too open-hearted but has probably had not a few
+parallels in fact. Generally, of course, the uninvited
+correspondent is merely a passing phenomenon&mdash;rarely
+perhaps welcome except to persons of very much self-centred
+temperament with a good deal of time on their
+hands; tolerated and choked off placably by the good-natured
+and well-mannered; answered snappishly or not
+answered at all by moroser victims.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>love letters</span></div>
+
+<p>There is yet a kind of letter, fictitious or real examples
+whereof are not usually given in books which (as the
+Articles say of the Apocrypha) are to be read "for example
+of life and instruction of manners," though it is in a way
+the most interesting of all; and that is the love-letter.
+It is, however, so varied in kind and not so very seldom so
+pre-eminent as an illustration of the epistolary ideal&mdash;"writing
+as you would talk"&mdash;that it would be absurd
+to say nothing about it in this Introduction, and that it
+may even be possible to give some examples of it&mdash;one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+such of Swift's must be given&mdash;in the text. Of those
+which, as it was said of one famous group (those of Mlle.
+de Lespinasse) "burn the paper," those of which the
+Abelard and Heloise collection, with those of "The Portuguese
+Nun," Maria Alcoforado, and Julie de Lespinasse
+herself are the most universally famous&mdash;we have two
+pretty recent collections in English from two of the
+greatest poets and one of the greatest poetesses in English
+of the nineteenth century. They are the letters, referred
+to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the
+Brownings to each other.</p>
+
+<p>There are, it is to be hoped, few people who read such
+letters (unless they are of such a date that Time has
+exercised his strange power of resanctifying desecration
+and making private property public) without an unpleasant
+consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is
+another class which is not exposed to any such disagreeable
+liability: and that is the very large proportion of love-letters
+where the amativeness is, so to speak, more or less
+concealed, or where, though scarcely covered with the
+thinnest veil, it is mixed with jest sometimes, jest rather
+on the wrong side of the mouth, perhaps, but jest exercising
+its usual power of embalming. (Salt and sugar both
+preserve: but in this particular instance the danger is of
+oversweetness already.) There can&mdash;or perhaps we
+should say there could, but for some differences of
+opinion worth attending to&mdash;be no doubt that Swift owes
+much to this mixture: and if anybody ever undertook a
+large collection of the best private love-letters he would
+probably find the same seasoning in the best of them. For
+examples in which the actual amatory element is present
+but as it were under-current, like blood that flushes a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+cheek but does not show outside it, some of the best
+examples are those of Scott to Lady Abercorn. Those
+recently published, and already glanced at, of Disraeli to
+various ladies would seem to be more demonstrative and
+more histrionic. But the section as admitted lies, for us,
+on the extreme border of our province. It is too important
+to be wholly omitted and therefore these paragraphs have
+been given to it. And it may require future touching in
+reference to some particular writers, especially that
+greatest and most unhappy of all Deans of Saint Patrick,
+the greatest perhaps of all Deans that ever were
+with the exception of John Donne&mdash;himself no small
+epistoler, but greatest in those verse-letters which are
+denied us.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps superfluous, but for completeness' sake
+may be permissible, to say a very little about the use of
+letters for purposes other than that of genuine personal
+communication. Indeed in doing so we are only executing
+the time-honoured man&#339;uvre of returning to the point
+whence we set out, and bringing the wheel full circle.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a>
+The strictly "business" letter&mdash;which is, of course, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+personal communication in a way&mdash;and the "despatch"
+which is a form of it intended sooner or later for more
+general information, require no notice or at best mere
+mention. But in times past if not also in those present,
+"Letters" have been used&mdash;specially perhaps in that
+century of letters, the eighteenth&mdash;for purposes of definite
+instruction, argument, propaganda and so forth. There
+are obvious advantages in the form for certain of the
+lighter of these purposes as it is used in Montesquieu's
+<i>Lettres Persanes</i> or Goldsmith's <i>Citizen of the World</i>. But
+why Bishop Hurd's <i>Letters on Chivalry and Romance</i>
+(really valuable as they are) should have been "Letters"
+at all, except for fashion's sake, it is difficult to say. There
+is perhaps more excuse for the pamphlet, especially the
+political pamphlet, assuming the title of letter as it has so
+often done in instances from the great example of Bolingbroke
+and Burke downwards.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> You have, with less
+unreality, the advantage of the classical "speech"
+addressed often to a single person, who is supposed to be
+specially aware of the facts or specially to need instruction
+and encouragement, or modified remonstrance, as to them.
+It was probably from these great exemplars&mdash;perhaps also
+aided by the custom of eighteenth century periodicals,
+that pamphlets of all kinds became titular epistles such as
+"A Letter to the deputy-manager of a Theatre Royal,
+London, on his lately acquired notoriety in contriving and
+arranging the 'Hair Powder Act'" (but this was satire),
+or "A letter writ by a clergyman to his neighbour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+concerning the kingdom and the allegiance due to the
+King and Queen."<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>letters to the papers</span></div>
+
+<p>For a last class may be taken the ever increasing body
+of things "written to the papers." It is unnecessary to
+consider the justice of a sarcastic division of mankind into
+"those who write to the papers and those who do not read
+the letters," or to discuss what men have been heard to
+say&mdash;that the people who write <i>to</i> papers are people who
+have not written <i>in</i> them. It is quite certain that, for
+many years past, the less frivolous kind of newspaper-correspondence
+has been of admitted interest and importance;
+indeed a paper might conceivably maintain its
+position after its repute has sunk in other ways, simply
+because more letters of importance appear in it than in
+others. As a source of illustrations of how to write and
+how not to write letters this modern development of the
+art could hardly be quite neglected; and it offers a
+curious study of various kinds. Except with very guileless
+writers the character-index quality is of course less
+certainly present than in letters written <i>not</i> for publication.
+A man must be, in the old Greek phrase, "either a God
+or a beast," if he does not prepare for print&mdash;if not exactly
+with a touch of "stage-fright," at any rate with the premeditation
+with which even stage-fright-free actors go
+on the stage. But it requires a great master or mistress
+of dissimulation to write even these letters at all frequently
+without a certain amount of self-revelation. And there
+is perhaps no more curious and interesting part of that
+most curious and interesting business of editing than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+(when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered
+correspondence. There is the pure lunatic, such as the
+man who for years sends despatches in a sort of cuneiform
+cipher, probably quite meaningless and certainly not
+likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive
+person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter
+quoted above) gives his opinion of your paper; the
+volunteer-corrector of obvious misprints; the innocent
+who merely wants to see his own signature in print, and
+who generally tries to bribe his way into it by references
+to "your powerful journal," etc. They are all there&mdash;waiting
+for the waste-paper basket.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h3>CONCLUSION</h3>
+
+
+<p>A few more general remarks may close this Introduction.
+Something on the Art of Letter-writing and also something
+on its history, especially in English, was promised.
+It is hoped that the promise has not been too much
+falsified, at least to the extent necessary for illustration
+and understanding of the specimens which should follow,
+and which in their turn should illustrate it and make it
+more intelligible. The History part requires little or no
+postscript; whether ill or well done it should pretty well
+speak for itself. What touches the Art may require
+certain cautions and provisos.</p>
+
+<p>This is especially the case with regard to the stress laid
+above on "naturalness." It is (as the present writer at
+least believes) the very passport of admission to the
+company of good letter-writers. But it must not be
+misconstrued. It is quite possible that too little care may
+be taken with the matter and style of letters. After all
+they correspond&mdash;in a certain, if in the most limited
+degree&mdash;to appearance "in company," and require as
+that does a certain etiquette of observance. Complete
+deshabille<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> on paper is not attractive: and there are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+letters (it is unnecessary to specify any particular
+examples) which somewhat exaggerate "simplicity."</p>
+
+<p>Cowper is perhaps the accepted classic in this style who
+has the least of <i>apparatus</i>: but even Cowper bestows a
+certain amount of care&mdash;indeed, a very considerable
+amount&mdash;on the dress of his letter's body, on the cookery
+of its provender. If you have only small beer to chronicle
+you can at the worst draw it and froth it and pour it out
+with some gesture. In this respect as in others, while
+letter-writing has not been inaccurately defined or
+described as the closest to conversation of literary forms
+that do not actually reproduce conversation itself, it
+remains apart from conversation and subject to an additional
+degree of discipline.</p>
+
+<div class="sidenote"><span class='smcap'>conclusion</span></div>
+
+<p>Enough should have been said earlier of the opposite
+fault by excess of dressing, which has, however, for a sort
+of solace the fact that it may pass as literature though not
+exactly as letter-writing. Actually beautiful style&mdash;not
+machine-made "fine writing," but that embodiment of
+thought which is a special incarnation of it&mdash;is the one
+thing secure of success and survival, whatever literary
+form it takes. And even short of this supreme beauty
+accomplished literary manner can never be quite unwelcome.
+The highest place in letter-writing has been
+refused here to Pope: and unfortunately there is hardly a
+division of his work which, when you know a little more
+about it and him, excites more disgust at the man's nature.
+But, at the same time, hardly even his verse convinces one
+more of that extraordinary power of expression as he
+wished to express things which this Alexander, in some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+ways the infinitely Little, possessed. Yet it gives in the
+first place a rather sophisticated enjoyment, open only to
+those whom the gods have made, or who have made themselves,
+critical. And in the second, whether sophisticated
+or not, what it gives is the enjoyment of literature not of
+life:<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> whereas the direct satisfaction which genuine letters
+afford is almost identical with that given by actual intercourse
+with other human beings. However, it is unnecessary
+to "go on refining."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps indeed, after all, the artificial letters may be
+permitted if only in an "utmost, last, provincial band," to
+add to the muster of pleasure-giving things which epistolary
+literature so amply provides. Even fiction itself,
+which, as has been said often, draws on this source, cannot
+supply anything more "pastimeous"; even drama anything
+more arresting to the attention. Indeed good
+letters may be said to be constantly presenting little
+stories, little dramas, little pictures&mdash;all of them sometimes
+not so <i>very</i> little&mdash;which are now practically complete;
+now easily filled up by any reasonable intelligence; now
+perhaps tantalizingly, but all the more interestingly
+enigmatic. For those people (one may or may not
+sympathise with them, but they are certainly pretty
+numerous) who cannot take interest or can only take a
+reduced interest in things that "did not really happen";
+letters may be even more interesting than novels. Only
+to very wayward or very unimaginative ones can they be
+less so, if they are in any respect good of their kind.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+<p>One of their main attractions is, with the same caution,
+their remarkable <i>variety</i>. It has been complained with a
+certain amount of truth that fiction, whether in prose or
+verse, is a little apt to fall into grooves: that all the
+histories are told, all the plays acted. This is undoubtedly
+the curse of Art, and every now and then we see it
+acknowledged in the most convincing manner by the
+frantic efforts made to be "different." But that real
+things and persons are never quite identical is not merely
+a philosophical doctrine but a practical fact. The "two
+peas" of one saying are never so much "alike" as the
+"two blades of grass" of another are unlike.</p>
+
+<p>Now as letters&mdash;that is to say letters that deserve to
+exist at all&mdash;are bound to reproduce the personality of
+their writers, it will follow that a refreshing diversity
+must also belong to them. And as a matter of fact this
+will be found to be the case. Even the eighteenth century&mdash;the
+century of rule and class, of objection to "the
+streaks of the tulip," of machine-made verse, etc.,&mdash;has,
+except in the case of letters artificially made to
+pattern, shown this signally.</p>
+
+<p>One last recommendation. A bad letter-writer is sure
+to betray himself almost everywhere, and letters are as a
+rule short. Most people must have attempted books of
+other classes, especially novels, and hoping against hope
+turned them over, and dipped and peeped till repeated
+disappointment compelled the traditional flinging to the
+other end of the room, or simply dropping the thing in
+less explosive weariness. You never need do that with
+letters. If a man's letters are not worth reading you will
+"have a confessing criminal" at once; if they are he will
+hardly be able to keep the quality latent whenever he goes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+beyond the shortest business note. The man of one book,
+in the sense of having read it, is proverbially formidable
+but in fact too frequently a bore. The man of one letter,
+in the sense of having written a good one and no more,
+probably never existed.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span></p>
+<h2>APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h3>GREEK LETTERS.&mdash;SYNESIUS (<i>c.</i> 375-430)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>English readers may know something, from Kingsley's
+<i>Hypatia</i>, of the excellent bishop of Ptolemais who, at the
+meeting of the fourth and fifth centuries, combined the
+functions of neo-Platonist philosopher, Christian prelate,
+country gentleman, and most efficient yeomanry officer
+against the ancestors, or at least forerunners, of the present
+Senussi, who were constantly raiding his diocese and its
+neighbourhood. These two letters&mdash;to Hypatia herself and
+to his brother&mdash;show him in different, but in each case
+favourable lights.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Letter CVIII. (to his Brother)</span></h4>
+
+<p>I have already got 300 spears and as many cutlasses,
+though I had, even before, only half a score two-edged
+swords: and these long flat blades are not forged with us.
+But I think the cutlasses can be struck more vigorously into
+the enemies' bodies, and so we shall use them. And at need
+we shall have bludgeons&mdash;for the wild olive trees are good
+with us.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> Some of our men have single-bladed axes at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+their belts with which those of us who have no defensive
+armour shall chop their<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> shields and make them fight on
+equal terms. The fight will, at a guess, come off to-morrow:
+for when some of the foe had fallen in with
+scouts of ours and pursuing them at their best speed had
+found them too good to catch, they bade them tell us
+what pleased us mightily&mdash;if indeed we may no more have
+to wander in the footsteps of those fellows who made off
+into the wastes of the interior. For they said they were
+going to stay where they were and wanted to find out
+what sort of fellows <i>we</i> were, who dared to separate ourselves
+so many days' journey from our own place that we
+might fight with men of war, nomads in way of life, and
+whose civil polity was like our discipline in war-time.
+Therefore, as one who by God's help shall to-morrow
+conquer&mdash;nay, conquer again if needful (for I would say
+nothing of bad omen) I commit to thee the care of my
+children: for it is fitting that thou, their uncle, shouldest
+carry over thine affection to them.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Letter CXXIV</span></h4>
+
+<p>"But if oblivion be the lot of the dead in Hades yet
+will <i>I</i>, even there, remember" my dear Hypatia. Beset
+as I am by the sufferings of my country, and sick, as I see
+daily weapons of war about me and men slaughtered like
+altar-victims; drawing as I do breath infected by rotting
+corpses; expecting myself a similar fate, (for who can be
+hopeful when the very atmosphere is weighed down and
+dusky with the shadow of carnivorous birds?) yet do I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+cling to my country. For what else would my feeling be,
+born and bred as I am, and with the not ignoble tombs of
+my fathers before my eyes? For thee alone does it seem
+to me that I could neglect my country, and if I could get
+leisure, force myself to run away.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a></p>
+
+
+<h3>LATIN LETTERS.&mdash;PLINY (62-114)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The most famous letters of the younger Pliny are those
+which describe his country houses, that which gives account
+of his uncle's death in the great eruption of Vesuvius, and
+his correspondence with Trajan. But the first mentioned
+are rather long and require a good deal of technical annotation;<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a>
+the second is to be found in many books; and the
+letters which make up the third (except those concerning
+Christianity, which are again to be found in many places)
+are mostly short and on points of business merely. The
+one I have chosen is extremely characteristic, in two
+respects, of the author and of Roman ways generally. It
+shows Pliny's good-nature and right feeling, but it shows
+also a certain "priggishness" with which he has been
+specially and personally charged, but which, to speak
+frankly, he shared with a great many of his famous countrymen.
+Priggishness was almost unknown among the
+Greeks&mdash;though one may suspect its presence among those
+Spartans who have told so few tales of themselves. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+it flourished at Rome, and was one of Rome's many&mdash;and
+one of her worst&mdash;legacies to us moderns. Secondly, the
+letter is amusing because one thinks what an English judge
+would surely think and would probably say, if counsel for
+a lady were to inform the court <i>uberius et latius</i> what an
+extremely good opinion that lady's father had of him, the
+learned speaker. A minor but still interesting difference
+is in Pliny's slight hesitation about taking a brief against
+a consul-elect. The subtleties of Roman etiquette are
+endless.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Plinius to his Asinius Gallus&mdash;Health</span></h4>
+
+<p>You both advise<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> and ask me to take up the cause of
+Corellia in her absence against C. Caecilius, Consul elect.
+I am obliged to you for advising me but I complain of
+your <i>asking</i>. I ought to be advised that I may know the
+fact, but not asked to do what it would be most disgraceful
+for me <i>not</i> to do. Could I doubt about protecting the
+daughter of Corellius? True, there is between me and
+him against whom you call on me, not exactly close
+friendship but still some friendship. There is also to be
+taken into account the man's worth and the honour to
+which he is destined, a thing which I ought to hold in the
+greater respect that I have myself already enjoyed it.
+For it is natural that things which one has oneself attained,
+one should wish to be regarded with the greatest respect.
+But when I think that I am to help Corellius' daughter,
+all this appears idle and empty. I seem to see the man
+than whom our age had no one more dignified, more pious,
+of an acuter mind; the man whom, when I had begun
+to like him out of admiration I admired more, contrary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+to what usually happens, the more thoroughly I knew
+him. For I did know him thoroughly; he kept nothing
+hid from me, neither jocular nor serious, neither sad nor
+glad. I was quite a young man: but already he held me
+in honour and I will dare to say respect&mdash;as if I were his
+contemporary. He gave me his vote and interest in my
+standings for honours; he, when I entered upon them,
+was my introducer and companion; when I carried them
+out, my adviser and guide. In fact, in every business of
+mine, though he was an old man and in weak health, he
+was as forward as if he were young and strong. How much
+he furthered my reputation, privately, publicly, and even
+with the Chief of the State! For when by chance, in the
+presence of the Emperor Nerva, the conversation had
+turned on young men of worth, and several persons spoke
+in praise of me, he kept silence for a little, which gave him
+the more authority. Then in the weighty manner you
+know, "I must needs," he said, "say all the less about
+Secundus<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> because he never does anything but by my
+advice." By saying this he gave me the credit (which it
+would have been extravagant in me to hope for) of never
+doing anything in other than the wisest way, seeing that
+I always acted on the advice of the wisest man. Moreover,
+when dying, he said to his daughter, as she is wont to
+declare, "I have provided you, as if I were myself to live
+longer, many friends: but for the chief of them Secundus
+and Cornutus." Now when I remember this, I see I must
+take care not in any way to disappoint the trust in me of
+this most fore-thoughtful man. Therefore I will come to
+Corellia's help without the least delay and will not refuse
+to undergo inconveniences: though I think I shall secure
+not merely pardon but even praise from the very person<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+who as you say is bringing a new action as against a
+woman, if it should happen to me to say these same things
+in court more amply and fully than the narrow room of
+a letter permits, either to excuse or indeed commend
+myself. Farewell.</p>
+
+
+<h3>LETTER OF THE "DARK" AGES</h3>
+
+<h3>SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS (431?-482-4)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Caius Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris is one of the most
+interesting figures of the troubled and obscure period
+intervening between the fall of the Roman Empire <i>proper</i>
+and the rise of mediaeval Europe. He was born at Lyons,
+married Papianilla, daughter of Flavius Avitus, who was
+to be one of the ephemeral "Emperors" of the West and
+the Decadence, but was not injured by his father-in-law's
+dethronement, and enjoyed various civil honours and
+posts. In 471, though a married layman, he was peremptorily
+made a bishop, and accordingly took orders,
+put away his wife, and discharged his sacred duties as
+creditably as he had discharged his profane ones. Sidonius
+was a not contemptible poet, and an interesting letter-writer.
+Like most literary men of his class he was given
+to what we call flattery; and this Ecdicius, of whom
+he made a sort of Dark Age Admirable Crichton, was his
+brother-in-law, an Emperor's son, and Count or Duke
+(the titles were often interchangeable) of the district. But
+it is fair to say that Gregory of Tours, the accepted historian
+of the period, and living only in the next century, makes
+the exploit over the Goths even more signal&mdash;for he reduces
+the troopers to <i>ten</i>. The Arverni (inhabitants of Auvergne
+and its neighbourhood) were the strongest tribe in Southern
+Gaul when the Romans first came into contact with them,
+retained much prominence in Caesar's time, and had not
+lost individuality, if they had lost independence, by this
+(5th) century. The mixture of "Arms" and the "Gown"
+is noteworthy.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Book III. Letter III</span></h4>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Sidonius to his Ecdicius&mdash;Health</span></h4>
+
+<p>If ever, now you are longed for by my Arvernians, whose
+love for you subdues them remarkably, and indeed for all
+sorts of reasons. First, because a man's native land has the
+greatest part in creating affection for him.<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> Then, because
+in your time you are about the only mortal who was
+longed for before his birth as much as he was rejoiced in
+after it.... I say nothing of such things&mdash;common to all,
+but no mean incitement to affection&mdash;as that you crawled
+as a child on the same turf with them. I pass over the
+grass which you first trod, the river you first swam, the
+woods you broke through in hunting. I leave out the
+fact that it was here you first played ball<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> and backgammon,<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a>
+that you hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the
+bow. I omit the fact that for the sake of your boyish
+presence students of letters came hither from all parts;
+and that it was due to you as an individual that our
+nobility, anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech,
+imbued itself now with the style of oratory, now with the
+measures of the Muse. And this specially kindled the
+love of the community<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> that you forbade those whom
+you had already made Latins<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> to remain barbarians.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a>
+For it could never slip the memory of our citizens what
+and how great you seemed, to every age and rank and sex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+on the half-ruined mounds of our walls, when, accompanied
+by scarcely eighteen horsemen, you cut your way through
+some thousands of Goths in full daylight and (which
+posterity will hardly believe) in the open field. A well
+trained army stood aghast at the sound of your name
+and the sight of your person: so that the leaders of the
+enemy, in their astonishment, hardly knew how many
+were their followers, how few yours. Their line was then
+withdrawn to the brow of a steep hill; it had before been
+gathered together to storm, but on your appearance was
+not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain
+some of their best men whom not sloth but courage had
+made the rearmost of the troop, occupied the level ground
+alone, though such a fight gave you not so many comrades
+as your table is wont to contain guests. And when you
+returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet
+you in the way of official compliments, applause, tears,
+rejoicings can be better guessed than described. One
+might see in the crammed halls of the spacious palace that
+happy ovation for your thronged return. Some caught
+up the dust of your footsteps to kiss it: others took out
+the horses' curbs stained with blood and foam; others
+prepared the stands for the saddles drenched with the
+horses' sweat; others, when you were about to put off
+your helmet, unbuckled the clasps of its plated chin-straps,
+or busied themselves with unlacing your greaves. Yet
+others counted the notches on the swords, blunted with
+slaughter, or measured with livid<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> fingers the rings of the
+corslets, slashed or pierced by weapons.<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span></p>
+<h3>EARLY MEDIAEVAL LETTER (<span class="smcap">Twelfth Century</span>)</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Of the other persons mentioned in this letter besides
+the widowed Duchess and King Louis VII., the first is
+Ralph, Count of (Peronne and) Vermandois, a leper. The
+lady's name was Eleanor, and she also was probably a
+widow; the Duchess's son Hugh was third of that name
+as Duke of Burgundy. Ivo, Count of Soissons, was the
+guardian of the Count of Vermandois, incapacitated legally
+by his plague. The proposed marriage did not come off.
+The business-like tone of the letter will only surprise those
+who do not really know the "Ages of Romance." I owe
+the selection of it to my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt.,
+who came to my aid in the dearth of books of this period
+which circumstances imposed on me.</p></div>
+
+<p>To Louis<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> most excellent King of the Franks by the
+grace of God, and her most beloved Lord, Mary, Duchess
+of Burgundy&mdash;health and due respect. It is known to
+your Majesty that my son is your liegeman, and, if it
+please you, your kinsman also. Whatsoever he can do is
+yours: and if he could do more it were yours. And so
+I all the more confidently ask your highest affection for
+my son. For it has been told me that Count Ralph of
+Peronne has a certain marriageable sister who, as has been
+reported to me and her own people, would be a suitable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+wife for my son. For this reason, most beloved Lord, I
+and he ask that you would look to this matter yourself
+and speak about it to the Count of Soissons, and settle
+how this marriage may be contracted. You must know
+that though my son might marry in another kingdom, I
+greatly prefer that he should take a wife in yours, rather
+than in any other. The nearer he becomes connected with
+you the more will he be yours and altogether a profit to
+you.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> It may of course be "illustrated" in the other sense by a
+second use of the pen; and we shall have instances of this kind
+to notice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> As has often been pointed out Ben Jonson's exquisite "Drink
+to me only with thine eyes" is a verse-paraphrase or mosaic
+from this writer's prose.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Pliny, if he did not always "write for publication," deliberately
+"published," as we should say, his letters. Indeed, he
+is one of the first to use the word in this sense, even if he uses
+it immediately of an oration not a letter. Some think Cicero
+meant publication; and he was very likely to do so.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The Latin statesman, like the Greek bishop, condescends to
+write about wine and even more fully. One of the most interesting
+and informing things on the subject is his discourse on
+<i>vinum acinaticium</i>, a sort of Roman Imperial Tokay made from
+grapes kept till the frost had touched them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Genuine letters of Sappho would have been of the first
+interest to compare with those of Heloise, and the "Portuguese
+Nun" and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Diotima's might have
+been as disappointing as George Eliot's: but by no means must
+necessarily have been so. Aspasia's, sometimes counterfeited,
+ought to have been good.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> It is part of the plan to give, as a sort of Appendix to the
+Introduction, and extension of it towards the main body of text,
+some specimens of Greek, Roman (classical and post-classical)
+and Early Mediaeval letter-writing, translated for the purpose
+by the present writer. The <i>continuity</i> of literary history is a
+thing which deserves to be attended to, especially when there is an
+ever-growing tendency to confine attention to things modern&mdash;albeit
+so soon to be antiquated! I owe the last of these specimens,
+in the Latin from which I translate it, to the kindness of
+my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., to whom I had recourse
+as not myself having access to a large library at the moment,
+and who has assisted me in other parts of this book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Yet others, as to authenticity, have, I believe, been rejected
+by all competent scholarship.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charri&egrave;re.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Some of us think Blake a great poet; but this is scarcely a
+general opinion, and he does not appear till the century was three
+parts over. Burns (whose own letters by the way do him little
+justice) hardly comes in.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Especially the most popular and voluminous if not the most
+important of all&mdash;the periodical and the novel.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> The danger being of many sorts&mdash;usually in the direction of
+various kinds of <i>excess</i>. A <i>quietly</i> tragic letter may be a masterpiece:
+perhaps there is no finer example than one to be again
+referred to, of Mrs. Carlyle's.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Mr. Paul thinks that "the baby language" is terribly out
+of character, and that there is "too much of it"; that Swift
+"would try to make love though he did not know what love
+meant"; and that the whole rings hollow and insincere. Others,
+women as well as men, have held that the "little language" is
+only less pathetic than it is charming; that Swift was one of the
+greatest, if one of the unhappiest lovers of the world; and that
+the thing is as sincere as if it had been written in the Palace of
+Truth and only hollow as is the space between Heaven and Hell.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> It should never be, but perhaps sometimes is, forgotten
+that "Stella" was a lady of unusual wits, and of what Swift's
+greatest decrier called in his own proteg&eacute;e Mrs. Williams "universal
+curiosity," that is to say not "inquisitiveness" but
+"intelligent interest." The politics etc. are not mere selfish
+attention to what interests the writer only.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> It must not be forgotten that she was Fielding's cousin.
+And after the remark above on Swift it is pleasant and may be
+fair to say that Mr. Paul is a hearty "Marian."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Johnson is again the chief and by no means trustworthy
+witness for this "insolence." But in the same breath he admitted
+that Chesterfield was "dignified." Now dignity is almost as
+doubtfully compatible with insolence as with impudence.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> It is difficult to think of anyone who has combined statesmanship
+(Chesterfield's accomplishments in which are constantly
+forgotten), social gifts and literary skill in an equal degree.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Excluding of course purely historical and public things like
+the trials of the '45 and the riots of '80.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> They were travelling together (always rather a test of
+friendship) in Italy, and Horace, as he confesses, no doubt gave
+himself airs. But it is pretty certain that Gray had not at this
+time, if he ever had, that fortunate combination of good (or at
+least well-commanded) temper and good breeding which enables
+a gentleman to meet such conduct with conduct on his own side
+as free from petulant "touchiness" as from ignoble parasitism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> Gray was not, like Walpole, a richly endowed sinecurist.
+But to use a familiar "bull" he seems never to have had anything
+to do, and never to have done it when he had. His poems are
+a mere handful; his excellent <i>Metrum</i> is a fragment; and as
+Professor of History at Cambridge he never did anything at all.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> They do not seem to have known each other personally.
+But (for reasons not difficult to assign but here irrelevant)
+Johnson was on the whole, though not wholly, unjust to Gray,
+and Gray seems to have disliked and spoken rudely of Johnson.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> The varieties of what may be called literary <i>exercise</i> which
+have been utilised for educational or recreative purposes, are
+almost innumerable. Has anyone ever tried "breaking up"
+a letter (such as those to be given hereafter) into a conversation
+by interlarded comment, questions, etc.?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> As far as the accidents are concerned. The essentials vary
+not. Marianne is eternal, whether she faints and blushes, or
+jazzes and&mdash;does not blush.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> One unfortunate exception, the <i>ex-post facto</i> references to
+the split with Lady Austin, may be urged by a relentless prosecutor.
+But when William has to choose between Mary and
+Anna it will go hard but he will <i>have</i> to be unfair to one of them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> This "swan's" utterances in poetry were quite unlike those
+of Tennyson's dying bird: and her taste in it was appalling.
+She tells Scott that the Border Ballads were totally destitute of
+any right to the name.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> For a singular misjudgment on this point see Prefatory
+Note <i>infra</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Particularly when he is able to apply the <i>Don Juan</i> mood of
+sarcastic if rather superficial life-criticism in which he was a
+real master.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> "violently and vulgarly absurd."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> It may, however, be suggested that the extraordinary
+<i>bluntness</i> (to use no stronger word) of both is almost sufficiently
+evidenced in the fact that in his last edition of Keats Mr. Forman
+committed the additional outrage of distributing these letters
+according to their dates among the rest. The isolation of the
+agony gives almost the only possible excuse for revealing it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> It is of course true that Shelley himself did not at first quite
+appreciate Keats. But <i>Adonais</i> cancels the deficit and leaves
+an almost infinite balance in favour. One can only hope that,
+had the circumstances been reversed, Keats would have set the
+account right as triumphantly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> This tendency makes it perhaps desirable to observe that in
+the <i>particular</i> context of the <i>Belle Dame</i> there is nothing whatever
+to cavil at.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> The recent centenary saw, as usual, with much welcome
+appreciation some uncritical excesses.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> In not a few cases they may be said to have been deliberately
+<i>un</i>prepared&mdash;intended though not labelled as "private and
+confidential."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> In which, be it remembered, the "Life-and-Letters" system
+only came in quite late.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> At the very moment when this is being written a considerable
+new body of them is announced for sale.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> The word "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is
+intended to indicate something of the general difference between
+"classical" ages on the one side and "romantic" or "realist"
+on the other.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Chesterfield's deafness might, without frivolity, be brought
+in. It is a hindrance to conversation, but none to letter-writing.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Or at least expression of themselves.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Idly: because he himself expressly and repeatedly disclaims
+<i>mere</i> "translation."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Dryden, in reference to Shadwell.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> "The Great God Pan" piece ("A Musical Instrument"), one
+of the last, was perhaps her <i>very</i> best. But he may have been
+thinking of <i>Poems before Congress</i>, which are poor enough.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Lucy, daughter of that curious Quaker banker's clerk
+Bernard Barton, whose poetry is negligible, but who must have
+had some strong personal attraction. For he was a favourite
+correspondent of two of the greatest of contemporary letter-writers,
+Lamb and FitzGerald, though he constantly misunderstood
+their letters; he received from Byron&mdash;on an occasion
+likely to provoke one of the "noble poet's" outbursts of pseudo-aristocratic
+insolence&mdash;a singularly wise and kindly answer;
+and having as a perfect stranger lectured Sir Robert Peel he
+was&mdash;invited to dinner!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Some have attempted to make a distinction, alleging that
+there are Franceses who can be called "Fanny" and others who
+can not. But it is doubtful whether this holds. Of two great
+proficients of "letter-stuff" in overlapping generations Fanny
+Burney was eminently a "Fanny." Fanny Kemble, though
+always called so, was not.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> She was the niece of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble,
+generally considered the greatest tragic actor and actress we
+have had; the daughter of Charles Kemble, a player and
+manager of long practice and great ability; while she had yet
+another uncle and any number of more distant relations in the
+profession.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> See Prefatory Note on her letters <i>infra</i>, for an illustration of
+what is said of her here and of Mrs. Carlyle a little further.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Gray may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on
+everyone: but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted
+that the more you read Walpole the more does the prejudice,
+which Macaulay and others have helped to create against him,
+crumble and melt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> They grow more and more numerous; a fresh batch having
+been announced while this Introduction was being written.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> I see that Mr. Paul also has made special reference to this
+letter and no wonder. From the time of its first publication
+I have regarded it as matchless. But it seems to me that while
+it is lawful to mention it, it should not have been published and
+that to republish it here would be at least questionable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> The present writer remembers as a boy reading (he supposes
+in the newspaper to which it was addressed but is not sure) this
+very remarkable epistle of Reade's to an editor: "Sir, you have
+brains of your own and good ones. Do not echo the bray of
+such a very small ass as the...." There was more, but this
+was the gist of it. Whether it has ever reappeared he cannot
+say.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Anthony Trollope did not choose to make his Autobiography
+a "Life-and-Letters." But he has used the inserted letter very
+freely and sometimes with great effect in his novels, for instance
+Mr. Slope's to Eleanor Harding in <i>Barchester Towers</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> In his Essay mentioned in Preface.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> The "Answer to the Introductory Epistle" of <i>The Monastery</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> This plan was older than the "novel <i>by</i> letters," and had,
+as noticed above, been largely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+century "heroic" romance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> There is of course a class exactly opposite to the love-letter&mdash;that
+of more or less modified hate or at least dislike. Johnson's
+epistle to Chesterfield is an example of the dignified form of this;
+Hazlitt's to Gifford of the undignified. But considering our
+deserved reputation for humour we are less strong than might
+be expected in letters which make the supposed writer make
+<i>himself</i> ridiculous. Sydney Smith's "Noodle's Oration" is the
+sort of thing in another kind: and some of the letters in the
+<i>Spectator</i> class of periodical are fun in the kind itself. Defoe's
+<i>Shortest Way with the Dissenters</i> comes near. But we have
+nothing like the famous <i>Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum</i>, which
+are the very triumph of the style.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> See the extensive classification of the Greeks, as noticed and
+reproduced before.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> The "Letter to Sir W. Windham" of the one and the "Letter
+to a noble Lord" of the other, have ample justification. <i>Letters
+on a Regicide Peace</i>, great as they are in themselves, have less
+claim to their title. But it was a favourite with both writers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> The King was William and the Queen Mary, which limits
+considerably the otherwise rather illimitable "concerning
+the kingdom."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> This word is of course a <i>vox nihili</i>, being neither French nor
+English. But it has usage in its favour, and I do not see that
+it is improved by writing it "<i>dis</i>habille." If anyone prefers
+the actual French form he can add the accents.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> The account of the journey with Lintot the publisher is
+sometimes quoted in disproof of this. It is amusing, but has
+still to some tastes Pope's factitiousness without the technical
+charm of his verse to carry it off.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> There is one small but rather famous class of letters which
+perhaps should receive separate though brief notice. It is that
+of laconic and either intentionally or unintentionally humorous
+utilisations of the letter-form. Of one sort Captain Walton's
+"Spanish fleet taken and destroyed as per margin" is probably
+the most noted type: of another the equally famous rejoinder
+of the Highland magnate to his rival "Dear Glengarry, When
+you have proved yourself to be my chief, I shall be happy to
+admit your claim. Meanwhile I am Yours, Macdonald." In
+pure farce of an irreverent kind, the possibly apocryphal interchange
+between a Royal Duke and a Right Reverend Bishop,
+"Dear Cork, Please ordain Stanhope, Yours, York," and "Dear
+York, Stanhope's ordained. Yours, Cork," has the palm as a
+recognised "chestnut." But these things are only the frills if
+not even the froth of the subject; and those who imitate them
+should exercise caution in the imitation. The police-courts, and
+even more exalted, but still more unwholesome abodes of Justice,
+have sometimes been the consequences of misguided satire in
+letters. Even in Captain Walton's case the Spaniards are said
+to have endeavoured to show that his ironical laconism (which,
+moreover, tradition has perhaps exaggerated in form) was not
+strictly in accordance with fact.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> Wild olive, with more peaceful uses, was also the usual
+material for the <i>un</i>peaceful club, or quarter-staff, often iron-shod,
+of the ancients. It was probably like the <i>lathi</i> which the mild
+Hindoo takes with him to political meetings. The <span class='greek' title='pelekys'>&#960;&#8051;&#955;&#949;&#954;&#965;&#962;</span> of
+the ancients was generally double-bladed, hence the limitation
+here. This would be lighter and more convenient to carry in
+the belt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> Of course "the enemies'."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> Synesius addresses his letters to Hypatia <span class='greek' title='t&ecirc; philosoph&ocirc;'>&#964;&#8135; &#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#8056;&#966;&#8179;</span>&mdash;"To
+<i>the</i> Philosophess." This contains at least two of the unapproachable
+"portmanteau" words in which Greek, and especially
+late Greek abounds&mdash;<span class='greek' title='philoch&ocirc;r&ocirc;n'>&#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#967;&#969;&#961;&#8182;&#957;</span>, "loving one's country,"
+and <span class='greek' title='metanasteuein'>&#956;&#949;&#964;&#945;&#957;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#949;&#8059;&#949;&#953;&#957;</span>, a rare and complicated compound in which
+I have ventured to see a hint of ironic intention. He feels that
+he will be a sort of shirker or deserter (<span class='greek' title='meta'>&#956;&#949;&#964;&#8048;</span> often imparts this
+meaning) but he will be coming to <i>her</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> This necessity of annotating beyond suitable limits was what
+prevented me, after due re-reading for the purpose, from giving
+any letter of Cicero's.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> <i>Admoneo</i> in Latin not unfrequently has our commercial
+sense of "advise" = inform, or remind of a fact. It will be
+remembered that in Elizabethan English this sense was not
+limited to business, as in "Art thou avis&eacute;d of that."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> The younger Pliny's full name was C. Plinius <i>Secundus</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> Among other natives of course.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Doubtless the game still played in Italy (<i>pallone</i>) and the South
+of France, with a wooden hand-guard strapped to the arm.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> <i>Pyrgus</i> is not exactly backgammon. The Romans had a
+sort of combined dice-box and board&mdash;the latter having a kind
+of tower fixed on the side with interior steps or stops, among
+which the dice tumbled and twisted before they fell out.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> <i>Universitas</i>: but though the context seems tempting, it is
+too early for "university" as a translation.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> in citizenship.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> in speech.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> Why <i>livescentibus</i> I am not sure. "Bruised by the rough
+mail"? But Lucretius has <i>digiti livescunt</i>: and Sidonius, like
+other poets of other decadences, is apt to borrow the phrases of
+his great predecessors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Sidonius has nearly as much more of this curious story: but
+the picture of the excitable Celts mobbing their heroes is vivid
+enough to make a good stopping-place. If things really went as
+described, one must suppose that a sudden panic came on the
+Goths, and that they took Ecdicius and his handful of troopers
+as merely <i>&eacute;claireurs</i> of a sally in force, and drew back to the
+higher ground to resist it.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> His own experience of marriage cannot have made the
+subject wholly agreeable to him: for he was, it may not be quite
+impertinent to remind the reader, the first husband of Eleanor
+of Guienne.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ENGLISH LETTERS</h2>
+
+
+<h2>THE PASTONS. <span class="smcap">Fifteenth Century</span></h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Few families in England have achieved a permanent
+"place i' the story" after such a curious fashion as the
+Pastons of Paston (Pastons "of that ilk") in Norfolk.
+They were not exactly "great people" and no member
+of the family was of very eminent distinction in any walk
+of life, though they had judges, soldiers, and sailors etc.
+among them, and though, some time before the house
+became extinct, its representative attained the peerage
+with the title of Earl of Yarmouth. But they were busy
+people in the troublesome times of the Roses, and they
+obtained a good deal of property, partly by the death of
+Sir John Fastolf, noted in the French wars and muddled
+by posterity (there seems to have been no real resemblance
+between them except an accusation of cowardice, probably
+false in both cases, and an imperfectly anagrammatised
+relation of names) with Shakespeare's "Falstaff." But
+they produced, received, and kept a great mass of letters
+which, despite the extinction of the family in 1732 survived,
+were partially printed later in the century by Fenn, and
+more fully a hundred years after by the late Mr. Gairdner.
+Although (see Introduction) of no particular literary merit
+they are singularly varied in subject and authorship, and
+they give us perhaps a more complete view of the domestic
+experiences of a single family (not dissociated from public
+affairs) than we have from any period of English history
+till quite modern times. Indeed, it would not be easy to
+put the finger on an exact parallel to them at <i>any</i> time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+I have selected from a great mass of documents two&mdash;one
+of love and one of war according to the good old division.
+John Jernyngan's letter to Margaret Mauteby&mdash;wife of
+John Paston, and one of the most notable and businesslike,
+though not the least affectionate of wives and mothers&mdash;is
+interesting for its combination of the two motives (were
+there also <i>two</i> "Mistress Blanches"?) and for the delightfully
+English frankness of its confession that "we were
+well and truly beat." On the other hand, that of Miss
+Margery Brews to John Paston the youngest (the John
+named above had two sons of his own name) is one of the
+most agreeable pieces of "plain and holy innocence," as
+Miranda calls it, on record. It is immediately preceded in
+the collection by another in which she is equally loving, and
+quotes some of the shockingly bad fifteenth century verse.
+One regrets to say that her "Valentine" had, apparently,
+more than one string to his bow at the moment. However,
+after vicissitudes in the "matter," as she delicately calls
+it, John and Margery did marry, and from them proceeded
+the later stages of the family. Whether things went equally
+well with Mr. Jernyngan and his Blanche (or either of his
+Blanches) does not seem to be recorded. (It has been
+thought better, though the taste of the moment seems to go
+rather the other way, not to encumber the reader with the
+original spelling, but there is no further modernisation.)</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">1. Letter 317 (Gairdner)</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Date June 1, 1458</p>
+
+<p>Right worshipful and my most best beloved mistress
+and cousin, I recommend me to you as lowly
+as I may, ever more desiring to hear of your good
+welfare; the which I beseech almighty Jesus to preserve
+you and keep you to his pleasure and to your gracious
+heart's desire. And, if it please you to hear of my welfare,
+I was in good heal(th) at the making of this letter, blessed
+be God.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Praying you that it please you for to send me word if
+my father was at Norwich with you at this Trinitymas or
+no, and how the matter doth between my mistress Blanche
+Witchingham and me and if ye suppose that it shall be
+brought about or no, and how ye feel my father, if he be
+well willing thereto or no; praying you lowly that I may
+be recommend(ed) lowly to my mistress Arblaster's wife,
+and to my mistress Blanche her daughter specially.</p>
+
+<p>Right worshipful cousin, if it please you for to hear of
+such tidings as we have here, the embassy of Burgundy
+shall come to Calais the Saturday after Corpus Christi day,
+as men say, 500 horse of them. Moreover on Trinity
+Sunday in the morning came tidings unto my Lord of
+Warwick that there were 28 sails of Spaniards on the sea,
+and whereof there was 16 great ships of forecastle. And
+then my Lord<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> went and manned 5 ships of forecastle and
+three carvells, and four pinnaces, and on the Monday, in
+the morning after Trinity Sunday, we met together afore
+Calais at 4 at the clock in the morning and fought that
+(<i>sic</i>) gether till 10 at the clock. And there we took six of
+their ships and they slew of our men about four twenties
+and hurt a two hundred of us right sore; and there were
+slain on their part about twelve twenties and hurt a five
+hundred of them.</p>
+
+<p>And (it) happened me at the first aboarding of us, we
+took a ship of three hundred ton, and I was left therein<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+and 23 men with me; and they fought so sore that our
+men were fain to leave them, and then come they and
+aboarded<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> the ship that I was in and there I was taken,
+and was prisoner with them 6 hours, and was delivered
+again for their men that were taken before. And as men
+say, there was not so great a battle upon the sea this forty
+winters. And forsooth we were well and truly beat: and
+my Lord hath sent for more ships, and like to fight together
+again in haste.</p>
+
+<p>No more I write unto you at this time, but that it please
+you for to recommend me unto my right reverend and
+worshipful cousin your husband, and mine uncle Gurney,
+and to mine aunt his wife and to all good masters and
+friends where it shall please you; and after the writing
+I have from you, I shall be at you in all haste. Written
+on Corpus Christi day in great haste by your own humble
+servant and cousin,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">John Jernyngan.</span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">2. Letter 784 (Gairdner)</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Date Feb. 1477</p>
+
+<p>Right worshipful and well-beloved Valentine, in my
+most humble wise I recommend me unto you.
+And heartily I thank you for the letter which
+that ye send me by John Beckerton, whereby I am informed
+and know that ye be purposed to come to Topcroft
+in short time, and without any errand or matter but only
+to have a conclusion of the matter between my father and
+you. I would be most glad of any creature in life so that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+the matter might grow to effect. And there as ye say,
+an ye come and find the matter no more towards you
+than ye did aforetime, ye would no more put my father
+and my lady my mother to no cost nor business, for that
+cause, a good while after&mdash;which causeth mine heart to
+be full heavy: and if that ye come, and the matter take
+to none effect, then should I be much more sorry and full
+of heaviness.</p>
+
+<p>And as for myself I have done and understood in the
+matter that I can and may, as good<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> knoweth: and I let
+you plainly understand that my father will no more money
+part withal in that behalf but &pound;100 and one mark which
+is right far from the accomplishment of your desire.</p>
+
+<p>Wherefore if that ye could be content with that good,
+and my poor person, I would be the merriest maiden on
+ground. And if ye think not yourself so satisfied, or that
+ye might have much more good, as I have understood by
+you afore&mdash;good, true, and loving Valentine,<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> that ye take
+no such labour upon you as to come more for that matter
+but let it pass and never more be spoken of, as I may be
+your true lover and bedeswoman<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> during my life.</p>
+
+<p>No more unto you at this time but Almighty Jesus
+preserve you both body and soul.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent3'>By your Valentine,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>M. B.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> It is to be feared that "My Lord's" action was rather
+piratical. The "Spanish Fleet" was of merchantmen ("convoyed"
+perhaps) on their way to the North with iron etc. for
+fish, silk, etc., and we were not definitely at war with Spain.
+But Henry the IV. of Castile was an ally of France. Warwick
+had just been appointed "Captain of Calais," and it was a
+general English idea that anything not English in the Channel
+was fair prize. Warwick's conduct was warmly welcomed in
+London.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> This use of "abord" and that just before are slightly different
+derivatives of the French <i>aborder</i>, which means to "approach,"
+"accost," "come together with" as well as to "board" in the
+naval sense. The first use here is evidently of the more general,
+the second of the particular kind.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> This may be a mere mis-spelling of "God," or a sort of
+euphemism like the modern "thank <i>goodness</i>!" to avoid the
+more sacred name.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> "I would" or "take care" or something similar to be
+supplied to make a somewhat softened imperative.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> One who prays for you.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ROGER ASCHAM (1515-1568)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Although the old phrase about "the schoolmaster being
+abroad" has never before had anything like the amount of
+applicableness which it now possesses, there is perhaps still
+a certain prejudice against schoolmasters. Indeed even
+some who have more than served time in that capacity will
+admit that it is a dangerous employment, profession, or
+vocation. But if all of us had been ever, or ever would try
+to be, like Roger Ascham, our class would never have
+deserved, or would victoriously wiped off, any obloquy. It
+was extraordinary good quality, or more extraordinary
+good fortune, that made the same man write <i>Toxophilus</i> and
+<i>The Schoolmaster</i>. And there need hardly be any admission
+of possible good luck as causing, though some certainly
+helped, his performance as a letter-writer. Something was
+said before as to the importance of his "getting to English"
+in this matter. But it may be permissible to remind, or
+perhaps even inform, some readers of the curious combination
+which made this importance. As a Renaissance
+scholar; as a College tutor before the middle of the sixteenth
+century; as a Secretary of Embassy on the Continent;
+and as Latin Secretary at Court, he was positively <i>un</i>likely
+to favour the vernacular. Nor could anyone be a warmer
+or wiser lover of the classics than he was. But what he,
+being all these things, did for English was all the more
+influential, while the manner of his doing it could hardly be
+bettered.</p>
+
+<p>Ascham's letters being partly in English and partly in
+Latin, there is a certain temptation to translate one of the
+latter and put it side by side with one of the former. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+the process might not be fair: and to give the fairer chance
+of comparison between originals in the two tongues would
+be out of the scheme of this book. I therefore choose a part
+of one of his long letters of travel to Cambridge friends&mdash;one
+of the earliest of the many "Up the Rhines" in English
+literature&mdash;and another part of his letters to Cecil. He
+has been reproached with the "begging" character of these,
+but it was the way of the time with Renaissance scholars.
+In the first "ioney" (Giles's text) must be wrong and
+towards the end "vile" is an amusing blunder for "<i>o</i>ile."
+"Peter Ailand" a Cambridge friend's child. "Brant" =
+"steep." In the second "Denny" is Sir Anthony D., a
+great favourite of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. who was
+now dead. "Cheke" the still better known "Sir John"
+had "taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek," and so
+raised the "goodly crop" but had taken to politics, which
+were to bring him into trouble.<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">3. To Mr. Edward Raven [extract]</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Augsburg</span> Jan. 20 1551</p>
+
+<p>13 Octob. We took a fair barge, with goodly glass
+windows, with seats of fir, as close as any house,
+we knew not whether it went or stood. Rhene
+is such a river that now I do not marvail that the poets make
+rivers gods. Rhene at Spires having a farther course to
+rin into the ocean sea than is the space betwixt Dover
+and Barwick is broader over a great deal than is Thames
+at Greenwich when it is calm weather. The Rhene runs
+fast and yet as smooth as the sea water stands in a vessel.</p>
+
+<p>From Colen this day we went to Bonna, the bishop's
+town, the country about Rhene here is plain and ioney.
+We were drawn up Rhene by horses. Little villages stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+by Rhene side, and as the barge came by, six or seven
+children, some stonenaked, some in their shirts, of the
+bigness of Peter Ailand, would run by use on the sands,
+singing psalms, and would rin and sing with us half a
+mile, whilst they had some money.</p>
+
+<p>We came late to Bonna at eight of the clock: our men
+were come afore with our horse: we could not be let into
+the town, no more than they do at Calise, after an hour.
+We stood cold at the gate a whole hour. At last we were
+fain, lord and lady, to lie in our barge all night, where I sat
+in my lady's side-saddle, leaning my head to a malle,
+better lodged than a dozen of my fellows.</p>
+
+<p>14 Octob. We sailed to Brousik: 15 miles afore we
+come to Bonna begin the vines and hills keeping in Rhene
+on both sides for the space of five or six days journey as
+we made them almost to Mayence, like the hills that
+compass Halifax about, but far branter up, as though the
+rocks did cover you like a pentice (pent-house): on the
+Rhene side all this journey be pathways where horse and
+man go commonly a yard broad, so fair that no weather
+can make it foul: if you look upwards ye are afraid the
+rocks will fall on your head; if you look downwards ye
+are afraid to tumble into Rhene, and if your horse founder
+it is not seven to six that ye shall miss falling into Rhene,
+there be many times stairs down into Rhene that men
+may come from their boats and walk on his bank, as we
+did every day four or five miles at once, plucking grapes
+not with our hands but with our mouths if we list.</p>
+
+<p>The grapes grow on the brant rocks so wonderfully that
+ye will marvel how men dare climb up to them, and yet
+so plentifully, that it is not only a marvel where men be
+found to labour it, but also almost where men dwell that
+drink it. Seven or eight days journey ye cannot cast your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+sight over the compass of vines. And surely this wine of
+Rhene is so good, so natural, so temperate, so ever like
+itself, as can be wished for man's use. I was afraid when
+I came out of England to miss beer; but I am more
+afraid when I shall come into England, that I cannot lack
+this wine.</p>
+
+<p>It is wonder to see how many castles stand on the tops
+of these rocks unwinable. The three bishops electors,
+Colen, Trevers and Mayence; be the princes almost of
+whole Rhene. The lansgrave hath goodly castles upon
+Rhene which the emperor cannot get. The palatine of
+Rhene is also a great lord on this river, and hath his name
+of a castle standing in the midst of Rhene on a rock.
+There be also goodly isles in Rhene, so full of walnut trees
+that they cannot be spent with eating, but they make vile
+of them. In some of these isles stand fair abbeys and
+nunneries wonderfully pleasant. The stones that hang
+so high over Rhene be very much of that stone that you
+use to write on in tables; every poor man's house there
+is covered with them.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">4. To Cecil [extract]</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Brussels</span> March 24. 1553</p>
+
+<p>If I should write oft, ye might think me too bold: and
+if I did leave off, ye might judge me either to forget
+your gentleness, or to mistrust your good will, who
+hath already so bound me unto you, as I shall rather forget
+myself, and wish God also to forget me, than not labour
+with all diligence and service to apply myself wholly to
+your will and purpose; and that ye shall well know how
+much I assure myself on your goodness, I will pass a piece
+of good manners, and be bold to borrow a little of your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+small leisure from your weighty affairs in the commonwealth.
+Therefore, if my letters shall find you at any
+leisure, they will trouble you a little in telling you ate
+length, as I promised in my last letters delivered unto you
+by Mr. Francis Yaxeley, why I am more desirous to
+have your help for my stay at Cambridge still than for
+any other kind of living elsewhere. I having now some
+experience of life led at home and abroad, and knowing
+what I can do most fitly, and how I would live most
+gladly, do well perceive there is no such quietness in
+England, nor pleasure in strange countries, as even in
+St. John's college, to keep company with the Bible, Plato,
+Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Tully. Which my choice
+of quietness is not purposed to lie in idleness, nor constrained
+by a wilful nature, because I will not or can not
+serve elsewhere, when I trust I could apply myself to
+mo kinds of life than I hope any need shall ever drive me
+to seek, but only because in choosing aptly for myself I
+might bring some profit to many others. And in this
+mine opinion I stand the more gladly, because it is
+grounded upon the judgment of worthy Mr. Denny. For
+the summer twelvemonth before he departed, dinner and
+supper he had me commonly with him, whose excellent
+wisdom, mingled with so pleasant mirth, I can never
+forget: emonges many other talks he would say oft unto
+me, if two duties did not command him to serve, the one
+his prince, the other his wife, he would surely become a
+student in St. John's, saying, "The Court, Mr. Ascham,
+is a place so slippery, that duty never so well done, is not
+a staff stiff enough to stand by always very surely, where
+ye shall many times reap most unkindness where ye have
+sown greatest pleasures, and those also ready to do you
+most hurt to whom you never intended to think any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+harm." Which sentences I heard very gladly then, and
+felt them soon after myself to be true. Thus I, first ready
+by mine own nature, then moved by good counsel, after
+driven by ill fortune, lastly called by quietness, thought
+it good to couch myself in Cambridge again. And in
+very deed, too many be pluckt from thence before they be
+ripe, though I myself am withered before I be gathered,
+and yet not so for that I have stood too long, but rather
+because the fruit which I bear is so very small. Yet seeing
+the goodly crop of Mr. Cheke is almost clean carried from
+thence, and I in a manner alone of that time left a standing
+straggler, peradventure though my fruit be very small,
+yet because the ground from whence it sprung was so
+good, I may yet be thought somewhat fit for seed, when
+all you the rest are taken up for better store, wherewith
+the king and his realm is now so nobly served. And in
+such a scarcity both of those, that were worthily called
+away when they were fit, and of such as unwisely part
+from thence, before they be ready, I dare now bolden
+myself, when the best be gone, to do some good among
+the mean that do tarry, trusting that my diligence shall
+deal with my disability, and the rather because the desire
+of shooting is so well shot away in me, either ended by
+time or left off for better purpose. Yet I do amiss to
+mislike shooting too much, which hath been hitherto my
+best friend, and even now looking back to the pleasure
+which I found in it, and perceiving small repentence to
+follow after it, by Plato's judgment I may think well of it.
+No, it never called me to go from my book, but it made
+both wit the lustier, and will the readier, to run to it
+again, and perchance going back sometimes from learning
+may serve even as well as it doth at leaping, to pass some
+of those which keep always their standing at their book.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> The allusions to the writer's own <i>Toxophilus</i> at the end
+require, it is to be hoped, no annotation.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span></p>
+<h2>LADY MARY SIDNEY (?<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a>-1586)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This "old Molly," as she so agreeably calls herself, was
+very unfortunate in her father (that intrusive holder for
+a short time of the title of Northumberland, who was
+offensive in success and abject in adversity) and not too
+lucky in her brother, Leicester. But she must have been
+far too good for her own breed; she had an excellent
+husband, Sir Henry Sidney, Deputy of Ireland and President
+of Wales, one of Elizabeth's best deserving and worst
+treated servants, and she was the mother of "Astrophel"
+and Astrophel's sister. "One has known persons more
+unfortunate," as a famous phrase of a French poem not
+very long after her own time has it. And she must have
+thoroughly deserved good fortune: for her letters show her
+as one of the best of wives and mothers (if not of spellers):
+though it is quite possible that she might not have made a
+good jurywoman or a good member of parliament. As her
+husband was not merely governor (repeatedly and with
+such success as was possible) of Ireland, but "President of
+Wales," they usually, when in England but not at Court
+or at Penshurst, lived at Ludlow Castle and so enjoyed two
+of the most beautiful homes in the country. But Sir Henry
+in these and other functions had seas of trouble, great
+expenses, and according to "Gloriana's" wont, very small
+thanks for it all. He is said, indeed, to have had his life
+shortened by weariness and worry. But his son and
+daughter<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> may have been a comfort to him: and his wife<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+must have been so. The letter itself, as will be seen, is
+not to himself but to his secretary: and there was more
+correspondence on the subject of their lodging and its
+difficulties. Lady Mary was not well, and there must be
+a place to see friends, and the Queen might come in! The
+original letter<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> is better spelt than others of hers, the
+principal curiosity being the form "hit" for "it," which,
+however, is by no means peculiar.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">5. To Edward Molineux, Esq.</span></p>
+
+<p>You have used the matter very well; but we must
+do more yet for the good dear Lord [her husband]
+than let him be thus dealt withal. Hampton
+Court I never yet knew so full as there were not spare
+rooms in it, when it has been thrice better filled than at
+the present it is. But some would be sorry, perhaps, my
+Lord should have so sure a footing in the Court. Well,
+all may be as well when the good God will. The whilst,
+I pray let us do what we may for our Lord's ease and quiet.
+Whereunto I think if you go to my Lord Howard, and in
+my Lord's name also move his Lordship to shew his
+brother my Lord, (as they call each other)&mdash;to show him
+a cast of his office<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> and that it should not be known allege
+your former causes, I think he will find out some place to
+serve that purpose. And also if you go to Mr Bowyer,<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a>
+the gentleman-Usher, and tell him his mother requireth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+him (which is myself) to help my Lord with some one
+room, but only for the dispatch of the multitude of Welsh
+and Irish people that follow him; and that you will give
+your word in my Lord's behalf and mine, it shall not be
+accounted as a lodging<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> or known of, I believe he will
+make what shift he can: you must assure him it is but
+for the day-time for his business, as indeed it is.</p>
+
+<p>As for my brother's answer of<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> my stay here for five
+or six days, he knows I have ventured far already with so
+long absence, and am ill thought of for it,<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> so as that may
+not be. But when the worst is known, old Lord Harry
+and his old Moll will do as well as they can in parting<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a>
+like good friends the small portion allotted our long
+service in Court, which as little as it is, seems something
+too much.<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> And this being all I can say to the matter,
+farewell, Mr. Ned.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>In haste this Monday 1578,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>your assured loving mistress and friend,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">M. Sydney</span>.</p>
+
+<p>If all this will not serve, prove<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> Mr Huggins, for I know
+my Lord would not for no good be destitute in this time
+for some convenient place for his followers and friends to
+resort to him, which in the case I am in, is not possible
+to be in <i>my</i> chamber till after sunset, when the dear good
+Lord shall be, as best becomes him, Lord of his own.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> Her birth-date does not seem to be known, but she was
+married in 1551.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> He had another, of the (for an English girl) very unusual
+name of "Ambros[z]ia" who died unmarried, at twenty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Most kindly copied for me by the Rev. W. Hunt from Arthur
+Collins's <i>Sydney Papers</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> An agreeable phrase, not in the least obsolete, though I
+have known ignorant persons who thought it so. The "office"
+was that of Lord Chamberlain; the holder was Lord Howard
+of Effingham, afterwards famous in the Armada fights.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> See <i>Kenilworth</i> (chap. xvi.), where Scott brings him in as
+experiencing Gloriana's extreme uncertainty of temper.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> a permanent one such as Hampton Court affords to some.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> "About"?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Either by the Queen herself, whose touchiness is well known,
+or by jealous and mischief-making fellow courtiers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> "Sharing."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> "Is grudged."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> We should say "try."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2>GEORGE CLIFFORD EARL OF CUMBERLAND<br />
+(1558-1605)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This not very fortunate or wholly blameless but very
+remarkable and representative person was the third holder
+of the earldom and the sixteenth of the famous barony
+of Clifford. He was great-grandson of Wordsworth's
+"Shepherd Lord"; father of Anne Countess of Dorset,
+Pembroke and Montgomery (pupil of Daniel the poet and
+a typical great lady of her time); one of the foremost of
+Elizabeth's privateering courtiers; one of the chief victims
+of her caprice and parsimony; a magnificent noble, but a
+great spendthrift, something of a libertine, never unkindly
+but hardly ever wise. This remarkable deathbed letter
+(the giving of which depended on the kindness of Dr. G. C.
+Williamson of Hampstead, author of the <i>Life and Voyages
+of G. Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland</i>, Cambridge University
+Press, 1920, in which it appeared, p. 270-1), pretty
+well explains itself. "Sweet Meg," his wife, was Lady
+Margaret Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford. The
+pair were on very affectionate terms for many years: but
+had latterly been estranged by certain infidelities on the
+Earl's part and by money disputes and difficulties, so that
+when his last illness attacked him Lady Cumberland was
+not with him. She was not, however, proof against this
+repentant appeal: but returned with her daughter. Both
+were present at his death in the Savoy soon after he wrote.
+He had made, personally or by deputy, ten if not twelve
+voyages against the Spaniards, and though there was a
+good deal of mismanagement about them he took Porto<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+Rico in one; captured, but made little profit out of, an
+enormously valuable prize, the <i>Madre de Dios</i>, in another;
+gave the warning which enabled Lord Thomas Howard to
+escape, but which Sir Richard Grenville refused to take
+"at Flores, in the Azores"; and built at his own expense,
+the largest privateer then or perhaps ever constructed, the
+<i>Malice Scourge</i>&mdash;for the remarkable subsequent history of
+which, see Mr. David Hannay's article, "<i>The Saga of a
+Ship</i>," in <i>Blackwood</i>, May, 1921.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>6.</p>
+
+<p>Sweet and dear Meg,</p>
+
+<p>Bear<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> with, I pray thee, the short and unapt
+setting together of these my last lines, a token of
+true kindness, which I protest cometh out of an unfeigned
+heart of love to thee. For whose content, and to make
+satisfaction for the wrongs done to thee I have, since I saw
+thee more desired to return than for any other earthly
+cause. But being so low brought that, without God's
+miraculous favour, there is no great likelihood of it I, by
+this, if so it please God that I shall not, in earnestness
+make my last requests, which as ever thou lovest me lying
+so, I pray thee perform for me being dead. First, in
+greedy earnestness I desire thee not to offend God in
+grieving too much at His disposing of me: but let my
+assured hope that He hath done it for the saving of my
+soul rather comfort thee, considering that we ought most
+to rejoice, when we see a thing that it is either for the
+good of our souls or of our friends. And further I beg<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+of thee that thou wilt take, as I have meant, in kindness
+the course I have set down for disposing of my estate and
+things left behind. Which truly, if I have not dealt most
+kindly with thee in, I am mistaken, and as ever thou
+lovest, (which I know thou hast done faithfully and truly)
+sweet Meg, let neither old conceit, new opinion, nor false
+lying tale, make thee fall to hard opinion nor suit with
+my brother. For this I protest now, when I tremble to
+speak that which upon any just colour may be turned to
+a lie, thou hast conceived wrong of him, for his nature is
+sweet, and though wrong conceit might well have urged
+him, yet he hath never to my knowledge said or done
+anything to harm thee or mine, but with tears hath often
+bemoaned himself to me that he could not devise how to
+make thee conceive rightly of him. And lastly, before
+the presence of God, I command thee, and in the nearest
+love of my heart I desire thee, to take great care that
+sweet Nan<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> whom God bless, may be carefully brought
+up in the fear of God, not to delight in worldly vanities,
+which I too well know be but baits to draw her out of the
+heavenly kingdom. And I pray thee thank thy kind uncle
+and aunt for her (?) and their many kindnesses to me.
+Thus, out of the bitter and greedy desire of a repentant
+heart, begging thy pardon for any wrong that ever in my
+life I did thee, I commend these my requests to thy wonted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+and undeserved kind wifely and lovely consideration, my
+body to God's disposing and my love (soul?) to His
+merciful commisseration.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>Thine as wholly as man was ever woman's,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">George Cumberland</span>.</p>
+
+<p>To my dear wife, the Countess of Cumberland, give this,
+of whom, from the bottom of my heart in the presence of
+God, I ask forgiveness for all the wrongs I have done her.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> There is, as often, little or no punctuation in the original, of
+which Dr. Williamson's beautiful book gives a facsimile. I have
+ventured to adjust that of the printed text, here and there, to
+bring out the meaning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> Lady Anne was at this time only 15. She seems to have
+been fond of her father and proud of him: nor is there any
+direct evidence that the fear of God was not in her. But she
+had no fear of man: and no excessive respect for her father's
+will. During the lives of her uncle Francis and her cousin
+Henry, 4th and 5th Earls, she fought it hard at law: and at
+last, Henry dying without issue, and the title lapsing, came
+into possession of the great Clifford estates in the North. She
+lived to be 86, and was masterful all her days.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JOHN DONNE (1573-1631)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The first poet in the world for some things,"&mdash;as Ben
+Jonson, who nevertheless did not like his metric, thought
+he would perish for not being understood, and perhaps did
+not understand him&mdash;called Donne with justice, might
+not be thought likely to be among the first letter-writers.
+The marvellous lightning-flashes of genius in a dark night
+of context which illuminate his poetry and his sermons,
+can hardly be expected&mdash;would indeed be almost out of
+place&mdash;in ordinary letter-writing. Moreover, Donne is,
+perhaps, with Browne, the most characteristic exponent of
+that magnificent seventeenth century style which accommodates
+itself ill to merely commonplace matters.</p>
+
+<p>Browne, a younger man by an entire generation who
+lived far into the age of Dryden, could drop this style
+when he chose: with Donne it was rather the skin&mdash;if not
+even the very flesh and bone and all but spirit&mdash;than the
+cloak of his thought. Nevertheless there is no exact
+contemporary of his&mdash;and certainly none possessing anything
+like his literary power&mdash;who deserves selection as a
+representative of his own school and time better than he
+does; and there is something in him which adds distinction
+to any company in which he appears. As mentioned in
+the Introduction, his verse-epistles were even more noteworthy,
+but in prose he is noteworthy enough.</p>
+
+<p>The batch of letters here chosen was most fortunately
+preserved by Izaak Walton, who published the first of them
+<i>in</i> the life not of Donne but of George Herbert, while the
+rest were "added" to it in 1670.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> The lady to whom they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+were written, Magdalen Newport by maiden name, was
+mother not only of the pious and poetical George, but of
+Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, himself not a very bad
+poet but by no means in the usual sense pious, a very great
+coxcomb, and a hero chiefly by his own report. His
+mother, however, seems to have been one of those "elect
+ladies" who were among the chief glories of England in
+the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were fortunately
+numerous. After her widowhood she lived at Oxford
+for some time, but seems to have moved to London when
+Donne, about 1607, wrote these letters. He was himself
+living at Mitcham (spelt "Michin" in one letter), not yet
+famous for golf though perhaps already for lavender.
+Later he visited her at Montgomery Castle, the famous seat
+of the Herberts. She is said to have been very beautiful,
+and the subtle touch of not in the least fatuous or foppish
+"devotion" is most agreeable.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>7. <span class="smcap">To the Lady Magdalen Herbert</span></p>
+
+<p>Madam,</p>
+
+<p>Your favours to me are everywhere. I use
+them, and have them. I enjoy them at London,
+and leave them there: and yet find them at Mitcham.
+Such riddles as these become things inexpressible: and
+such is your goodness. I was almost sorry to find your
+servant here this day, because I was loath to have any
+witness of my not coming home last night, and indeed
+of my coming this morning. But my not coming was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+excusable, because earnest business detained me; and my
+coming this day is by example of your St. Mary Magdalen,
+who rose early upon Sunday, to seek that which she loved
+most; and so did I. And, from her and myself, I return
+such thanks as are due to one, to whom we owe all the
+good opinion that they, whom we need most, have of us.
+By this messenger and on this good day, I commit the
+enclosed Holy Hymns and Sonnets&mdash;which for the matter
+not the workmanship have yet escaped the fire,&mdash;to your
+judgment and to your protection too, if you think them
+worthy of it; and I have appointed this enclosed Sonnet
+to usher them to your happy hand.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>
+Your unworthiest servant unless your accepting
+him to be so have mended him</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Jo. Donne</span>.</p>
+
+<p>(<span class="smcap">Mitcham</span> July 11. 1607)</p>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">To the Lady Magdalen Herbert: of St. Mary
+Magdalen</span></p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Her of your name, whose fair inheritance<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An active faith so highly did advance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That she once knew, more than the church did know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Resurrection! so much good there is<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Delivered of her, that some Fathers be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Loath to believe one woman could do this;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But think these Magdalens were two or three.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Increase their number, Lady, and their fame:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To their devotion, add your innocence;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take so much of the example as the name<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The latter half&mdash;and in some recompense<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That they did harbour Christ Himself&mdash;a guest<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Harbour these Hymns, to His dear Name addressed.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span></div></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">8. To The Lady Magdalen Herbert</span></p>
+
+<p>Madam,</p>
+
+<p>Every excuse hath in it somewhat of accusation;
+and since I am innocent, and yet must
+excuse, how shall I do for that part of accusing. By my
+troth, as desperate and perplexed men, grow from thence
+bold; so must I take the boldness of accusing you, who
+would draw so dark a Curtain betwixt me and your purposes,
+as that I had no glimmering, neither of your goings,
+nor the way which my Letters might haunt. Yet, I have
+given this Licence to Travel, but I know not whither, nor
+it. It is therefore rather a Pinnace to discover; and the
+entire Colony of Letters, of Hundreds and Fifties, must
+follow; whose employment is more honourable, than that
+which our State meditates to <i>Virginia</i> because you are
+worthier than all that Country, of which that is a wretched
+inch; for you have better treasure and a harmlessness.
+If this sound like a flattery, tear it out. I am to my
+Letters as rigid a Puritan as Caesar was to his Wife. I can
+as ill endure a suspicious and misinterpretable word as a
+fault; and of the grossest flatteries there is this good use,
+that they tell us what we should be. But, <i>Madam</i>, you
+are beyond instruction, and therefore there can belong to
+you only praise; of which, though you be no good hearer,
+yet allow all my Letters leave to have in them one part
+of it, which is thankfulness towards you.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+<i>Your unworthiest Servant<br />
+Except your accepting<br />
+have mended him</i></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">John Donne</span>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mitcham</span>, July 11, 1607.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>9. <i>To the worthiest Lady, Mrs.</i> <span class="smcap">Magdalen Herber(t)</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Madam</i>,</p>
+
+<p>This is my second Letter, in which though
+I cannot tell you what is good, yet this is the
+worst, that I must be a great part of it; yet to me, that
+is recompensed, because you must be mingled. After
+I knew you were gone (for I must, little less than accusingly
+tell you, I knew not you would go) I sent my first
+Letter, like a <i>Bevis of Hampton</i>, to seek Adventures. This
+day I came to Town, and to the best part of it, your House;
+for your memory is a State-cloth and Presence; which
+I reverence, though you be away; though I need not seek
+that there which I have about and within me. There,
+though I found my accusation, yet anything to which your
+hand is, is a pardon; yet I would not burn my first Letter,
+because as in great destiny no small passage can be omitted
+or frustrated, so in my resolution of writing almost daily
+to you, I would have no link of the Chain broke by me,
+both because my Letters interpret one another, and
+because only their number can give them weight. If I had
+your Commission and Instructions to do you the service
+of a Legier Ambassador here, I could say something of the
+Countess of <i>Devon</i>: of the States, and such things. But
+since to you, who are not only a World alone, but the
+Monarchy of the World your self, nothing can be added,
+especially by me; I will sustain myself with the honour
+of being</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+<i>Your Servant Extraordinary<br />
+And without place</i></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">John Donne</span>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">London</span><br />
+July 23, 1607<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>10. <i>To the worthiest Lady, Mrs</i>. <span class="smcap">Magdalen Herbert</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Madam</i>,</p>
+
+<p>As we must die before we can have full glory
+and happiness, so before I can have this degree
+of it, as to see you by a Letter, I must almost die, that is,
+come to <i>London</i>, to plaguy <i>London</i>; a place full of danger,
+and vanity, and vice, though the Court be gone. And
+such it will be, till your return redeem it: Not that, the
+greatest virtue in the World, which is you, can be such a
+Marshal, as to defeat, or disperse all the vice of this place;
+but as higher bodies remove, or contract themselves, when
+better come, so at your return we shall have one door open
+to innocence. Yet, Madam, you are not such an Ireland,
+as produceth neither ill, nor good; no Spiders or Nightingales,
+which is a rare degree of perfection: But you have
+found and practised that experiment, That even nature,
+out of her detesting of emptiness, if we will make that our
+work to remove bad, will fill us with good things. To
+abstain from it, was therefore but the Childhood and
+Minority of your Soul, which hath been long exercised
+since, in your manlier active part, of doing good. Of
+which since I have been a witness and subject, not to tell
+you some times, that by your influence and example I have
+attained to such a step of goodness, as to be thankful, were
+both to accuse your power and judgment of impotency
+and infirmity.</p>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Your Ladyship's in all Services</i>,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">John Donne</span>.<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a></p>
+
+<p>August 2d, 1607.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> Mr. Gosse (who has inserted them in his <i>Life and Letters of
+Donne</i>) is perhaps right in putting letter 7 last. I give no
+opinion on this but merely keep the order in which they originally
+appeared in the text and in an appendix to the <i>Life of Herbert</i>
+(1670 edit.). I am not certain to which "first" the "second" in
+letter 9 refers. "Bevis of Hampton" generally for "knight
+errant"; "Legier," a <i>resident</i> Ambassador; "States" in the
+plural&mdash;always then "the Dutch"; <i>Snake</i>lessness is more often
+assigned to Ireland than spiderlessness.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> The first of these letters, with the sonnet, appears, I think, in
+all editions of Walton, who has apparently entered the date
+wrongly. The other three were copied for me from the 1670
+original by Miss Elsie Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a
+few spellings in them.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JAMES HOWELL (1593-1666)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The Father" of something is an expression in the
+history of literature which has become, more justly than
+some other traditional expressions, rather odious to the
+modern mind. For in the first place it is an irritatingly
+conventional phrase, and in the second the paternity is
+usually questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the
+Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters)
+calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of
+all such as in English write unofficial letters "for publication."<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a>
+He wrote a great deal else: and would no doubt
+in more recent times have been a "polygraphic" journalist
+of some distinction. And he had plenty to write about.
+He was an Oxford man; he travelled abroad on commercial
+errands (though by no means as what has been
+more recently called a "commercial traveller"); he was
+one of Ben Jonson's "sons," a Royalist sufferer from the
+Rebellion, and finally Historiographer Royal as well as
+Clerk to the Council. His letters, which are sometimes
+only titularly such<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> but sometimes quite natural, deal
+with all sorts of subjects&mdash;from the murder of Buckingham
+by Felton to the story of the Oxenham "White Bird"
+which Kingsley has utilised in <i>Westward Ho!</i> And, to do
+him justice, there is a certain character about the book
+which is not <i>merely</i> the expression of the character of the
+writer, though no doubt connected with it. Now the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+possession of this is what makes a book literature. It has
+been usual to select from Howell's letters of travel, and
+from historical ones like the Buckingham one above
+mentioned. I have preferred the "White Bird"; and
+before it one of several documents, of the same or nearly the
+same period, which deal with the old English life of country
+houses&mdash;between the mediaeval time and the degradation
+of the "servant" class, which came in with the eighteenth
+century or a little earlier. Howell would evidently have
+echoed Isopel Berners&mdash;that admirable girl whom George
+Borrow slighted&mdash;in saying, "Long Melford for ever!"
+though the house would not with him, as with her, have meant
+a workhouse. Neither letter seems to require annotation.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>11. <span class="smcap">To Dan Caldwell, Esq., from the Lord Savage's
+House in Long Melford</span></p>
+
+<p>My dear Dan,</p>
+
+<p>Tho' considering my former condition of life,
+I may now be called a countryman, yet you
+cannot call me a rustic (as you would imply in your letter)
+as long as I live in so civil and noble a family, as long as
+I lodge in so virtuous and regular a house as any, I believe,
+in the land, both for economical government and the
+choice company; for I never saw yet such a dainty race
+of children in all my life together. I never saw yet such
+an orderly and punctual attendance of servants, nor a
+great house so neatly kept; here one shall see no dog, nor
+a cat, nor cage to cause any nastiness within the body of
+the house. The kitchen and gutters and other offices of
+noise and drudgery are at the fag-end; there's a back-gate
+for the beggars and the meaner sort of swains to come
+in at; the stables butt upon the park, which, for a cheerful
+rising ground, for groves and browsings for the deer, for
+rivulets of water, may compare with any of its bigness in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+the whole land; it is opposite to the front of the great
+house, whence from the gallery one may see much of the
+game when they are a-hunting. Now for the gardening
+and costly choice flowers, for ponds, for stately large walks
+green and gravelly, for orchards and choice fruits of all
+sorts, there are few the like in England; here you have
+your Bon Chr&eacute;tien pear and Burgamot in perfection; your
+Muscadel grapes in such plenty that there are some bottles
+of wine sent every year to the King: and one Mr. Daniel,
+a worthy gentleman hard by who hath been long abroad,
+makes good store in his vintage. Truly this house of Long
+Melford tho' it be not so great, yet is so well compacted
+and contriv'd with such dainty conveniences every way;
+that if you saw the landskip of it, you would be mightily
+taken with it and it would serve for a choice pattern to
+build and contrive a house by. If you come this summer
+to your Manor of Sheriff in Essex, you will not be far off
+hence; if your occasions will permit, it will be worth your
+coming hither, tho' it be only to see him, who would think
+it a short journey to go from St. David's Head to Dover
+Cliffs to see and serve you, were there occasion; if you
+would know who the same is, 'tis&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Yours,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>J. H.</p>
+
+<p>20. May, 1619.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>12. <span class="smcap">To Mr. E. D.</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir,</p>
+
+<p>I thank you a thousand times for the noble
+entertainment you gave me at Bury; and the
+pains you took in showing me the antiquities of that place.
+In requital, I can tell you of a strange thing I saw lately
+here, and I believe 'tis true. As I passed by St. Dunstan's
+in Fleet Street the last Saturday, I stepped into a lapidary,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+or stone-cutter's shop, to treat with the master for a stone
+to be put upon my father's tomb; and casting my eyes
+up and down, I might spy a huge marble with a large inscription
+upon't, which was thus to my best remembrance:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Here lies </i>John Oxenham<i>, a goodly young man,
+in whose chamber, as he was struggling with
+the pangs of death, a bird with a white breast
+was seen fluttering about his bed, and so
+vanished.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Here lies also </i>Mary Oxenham<i>, the sister of the
+said </i>John<i>, who died the next day, and the said
+apparition was seen in the room.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>Then another sister is spoke of, then,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Here lies hard by </i>James Oxenham<i>, the son of
+the said </i>John<i>, who died a child in his cradle a
+little after; and such a bird was seen fluttering
+about his head, a little before he expired, which
+vanished afterwards.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>At the bottom of the stone there is:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><i>Here lies </i>Elizabeth Oxenham<i> the mother of
+the said </i>John<i>, who died sixteen years since,
+when such a bird with a white breast was seen
+about her bed before her death.</i></p></div>
+
+<p>To all these there be divers witnesses, both squires and
+ladies, whose names are engraven upon the stone. This
+stone is to be sent to a town hard by Exeter, where this
+happened. Were you here, I could raise a choice discourse
+with you hereupon. So, hoping to see you the
+next term, to requite some of your favours,</p>
+
+<p class='center'>I rest&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class='center'>Your true friend to serve you,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>J. H.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Westminster</span>, 3 July. 1632</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> <i>Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters</i> (1657).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> Indeed his correspondents are probably sometimes, if not
+always, imaginary: and many of the letters are only what in
+modern periodicals are called "middle" articles on this and that
+subject, headed and tailed with the usual letter-formulas.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JOHN EVELYN (1620-1706)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As is naturally the case with writers of "Diaries,"
+"Memoirs," "Autobiographies," and the like, a good deal
+of matter is deflected into Evelyn's famous <i>Diary</i> from
+possible letters: while his numerous and voluminous
+published works may also to some extent abstract from or
+duplicate his correspondence. But there is enough of this<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a>
+to make him a noteworthy epistoler. And it is interesting,
+though not perhaps surprising, to find that while his Diary
+is less piquant than his friend Mr. Pepys's, his letters are
+more so. Not surprising&mdash;first, because official letter-writers
+(Evelyn did a good deal of public work but was
+never <i>exactly</i> an official) often get into a habit of noncommittal;
+and secondly, because there is, in these things
+as in others, a principle of compensation. Evelyn was
+almost sure to be a good letter-writer<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> for he had a ready
+pen, a rather extraordinary range of interests and capacities,
+plenty of time and means, extensive knowledge of the world,
+and last but not least, a tendency&mdash;not missed by the
+aforesaid Mr. Pepys&mdash;to bestow his information and opinion
+freely upon less fortunately endowed and equipped mortals.
+If he never quite reaches in letters the famous passages of
+the Diary, describing the great Fire, and Whitehall on the
+eve of Charles the Second's mortal seizure, he sometimes
+comes near to this, and diffuses throughout a blend of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+humanism, and humanity, of science and art, which is
+very agreeable. His wife also was no mean letter-writer,
+but only one of the minor stars of that day round the
+moon, Dorothy Osborne, to whom we come next. Of
+Evelyn's own letters several are specially tempting.
+His curious plan (a particularly favourite craze of the
+sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) for a small "college"
+or lay convent of ladies and gentlemen, a sort of miniature
+"Abbey of Thelema" is one. His magnificent
+eulogy of the Duchess of Newcastle (Lamb's "dear
+Margaret"), which puzzled his editor Bray (from this
+and other notes a rather stupid man), is another: and
+his very interesting letter to Pepys on Dreams (Oct. 4,
+1689) a third. But on the whole I have preferred the
+following, which may remind some readers of Mr. Kipling's
+charming poem on the wonderful things our fathers did
+and believed, with its invaluable reminder that after all it
+would be lucky for us if we were no worse than they. The
+date is not given: but the letter is printed between one
+of August and one of September, 1668. <span class='greek' title='kollourion'>&#954;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#8059;&#961;&#953;&#959;&#957;</span> =
+Collyrium = "eyewash." "Stillatim" = "drop by drop."
+"Lixivium" (Fr. "lessive") = "lye," "soapwater." "Catoptrics"
+and "otacoustics" (though the "ot" = "ear"
+has gone)&mdash;are fairly modern words, "phonocamptics"
+scarcely so. In fact, I do not remember seeing it elsewhere.
+It does not appear to be a classical Greek compound, but
+should mean "the art of guiding and managing the voice."<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a>
+The Tom Whittal story shows that Evelyn, though given to
+seriousness, could (God rest his soul) be a merry man sometimes.
+The other proper names, from Mr. Oldenburg to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+Thom. Fazzello, could be expounded without difficulty,
+but with unnecessary expenditure of space.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>13. <span class="smcap">John Evelyn to Doctor Beale</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir,</p>
+
+<p>I happened to be with Mr Oldenburg some time
+since, almost upon the article of his receiving the
+notice you sent him of your fortunate and useful invention;
+and I remember I did first of all incite him, both to
+insert it into his next transactions, and to provoke your
+further prosecution of it; which I exceedingly rejoice to
+find has been so successful, that you give us hopes of your
+further thoughts upon that, and those other subjects
+which you mention. You may haply call to remembrance
+a passage of the Jesuit Honorati Fabri, who speaking of
+perspectives, observes, that an object looked on through
+a small hole appears magnified; from whence he suggests,
+the casting of two plates neatly perforated, and fitted to
+look through, preferable to glasses, whose refractions injure
+the sight. Though I begin to advance in years (being now
+on the other side of forty), yet the continuance of the
+perfect use of my senses (for which I bless Almighty God)
+has rendered me the less solicitous about those artificial
+aids; which yet I foresee I must shortly apply myself to,
+and therefore you can receive but slender hints from me
+which will be worthy your acceptance upon that argument;
+only, I well remember, that besides Tiberius of old (whom
+you seem to instance in), Joseph Scaliger affirms the same
+happened both to his father Julius and himself, in their
+younger years. And sometimes, methinks, I myself have
+fancied to have discerned things in a very dark place, when
+the curtains about my bed have been drawn, as my hands,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+fingers, the sheet, and bedclothes; but since my too intent
+poring upon a famous eclipse of the sun, about twelve
+years since, at which time I could as familiarly have stared
+with open eyes upon the glorious planet in its full lustre,
+as now upon a glow-worm (comparatively speaking), I have
+not only lost the acuteness of sight, but much impaired
+the vigour of it for such purposes as it then served me.
+But besides that, I have treated mine eyes very ill near
+these twenty years, during all which time I have rarely
+put them together, or composed them to sleep, before one
+at night, and sometimes much later: that I may in some
+sort redeem my losses by day, in which I am continually
+importuned with visits from my neighbours and acquaintance,
+or taken up by other impertinencies of my life in
+this place. I am plainly ashamed to tell you this, considering
+how little I have improved myself by it; but
+I have rarely been in bed before twelve o'clock as I said,
+in the space of twenty years; and yet I read the least
+print, even in a jolting coach, without other assistance,
+save that I now and then used to rub my shut eye-lids
+over with a spirit of wine well rectified, in which I distil
+a few rosemary flowers much after the process of the
+Queen of Hungary's water, which does exceedingly fortify,
+not only my sight, but the rest of my senses, especially
+my hearing and smelling; a drop or two being distilled
+into the nose or ears, when they are never so dull; and
+other <span class='greek' title='kollourion'>&#954;&#959;&#955;&#955;&#959;&#8059;&#961;&#953;&#959;&#957;</span> I never apply. Indeed, in the summer
+time, I have found wonderful benefit in bathing my head
+with a decoction of some hot and aromatical herbs, in a
+lixivium made of the ashes of vine branches; and when
+my head is well washed with this, I immediately cause
+abundance of cold fountain water to be poured upon me
+<i>stillatim</i>, for a good half-hour together; which for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+present is not only one of the most voluptuous and grateful
+refreshments imaginable, but an incredible benefit to
+me the whole year after: for I never need other powdering
+to my hair, to preserve it bright and clean, as the gallants
+do; but which does certainly greatly prejudice transpiration
+by filling up, or lying heavy upon the pores. Those,
+therefore, who (since the use of perukes) accustom to wash
+their heads, instead of powdering, would doubtless find the
+benefit of it; both as to the preventing of aches in their
+head, teeth, and ears, if the vicissitude and inconstancy
+of the weather, and consequently the use of their monstrous
+perukes, did not expose them to the danger of
+catching colds. When I travelled in Italy, and the
+Southern parts, I did sometimes frequent the public baths
+(as the manner is), but seldom without peril of my life,
+till I used this frigid effusion, or rather profusion of cold
+water before I put on my garments, or durst expose
+myself to the air; and for this method I was obliged to
+the old and noble Rantzow, in whose book <i>De conservand&acirc;
+valetudine</i> I had read a passage to this purpose; though
+I might have remembered how the Dutchmen treated
+their labouring horses when they are all over in a
+froth, which they wash off with several buckets of cold
+water, as I have frequently observed it in the Low
+Countries.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning other aids; besides what the masters of the
+catoptrics, phonocamptics, otacoustics, &amp;c., have done,
+something has been attempted by the Royal Society; and
+you know the industrious Kircher has much laboured.
+The rest of those artificial helps are summed up by the
+Jesuit And. Schottus. I remember that Monsieur Huygens
+(author of the pendulum), who brought up the
+learned father of that incomparable youth Monsieur de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+Zulichem, who used to prescribe to me the benefit of his
+little wax taper (a type whereof is, with the history of it,
+in some of our Registers) for night elucubrations, preferable
+to all other candle or lamp light whatsoever. And
+because it explodes all glaring of the flame, which by no
+means ought to dart upon the eyes, it seems very much
+to establish your happy invention of tubes instead of
+spectacles, which have not those necessary defences.</p>
+
+<p>Touching the sight of cats in the night, I am not well
+satisfied of the exquisiteness of that sense in them. I
+believe their smelling or hearing does much contribute to
+their dexterity in catching mice, as to all those animals
+who are born with those prolix smelling hairs. Fish will
+gather themselves in shoals to any extraordinary light in
+the dark night, and many are best caught by that artifice.
+But whatever may be said of these, and other senses of
+fish, you know how much the sagacity of birds and beasts
+excel us; how far eagles and vultures, ravens and other
+fowls will smell the carcase; <i>odorumque canum vis</i>, as
+Lucretius expresses it, and we daily find by their drawing
+after the games. Gesner affirms that an otter will wind
+a fish four miles distance in the water, and my Lord
+Verulam (cent. 8) speaks of that element's being also a
+medium of sounds, as well as air. Eels do manifestly stir
+at the cracking of thunder, but that may also be attributed
+to some other tremulous motion; yet carps and other fish
+are known to come at the call and the sound of a bell, as
+I have been informed. Notorious is the story of Arion,
+and of Lucullus's lampreys which came <i>ad nomen</i>; and
+you have formerly minded me of Varro's Greek pipe, of
+which Lucian and Cicero (ad Atticum) take occasion to
+speak. Pliny's dolphin is famous, and what is related of
+the American Manati: but the most stupendous instance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+that of the xiphia or sword-fish, which the Mamertines can
+take up by no other strategem than a song of certain
+barbarous words, as the thing is related by Thom. Fazzello.
+It is certain that we hear more accurately when we hold
+our mouths a little open, than when we keep them shut;
+and I have heard of a dumb gentleman in England who
+was taught to speak (and therefore certainly brought to
+hear in some degree) by applying the head of a base viol
+against his teeth, and striking upon the strings with the
+bow. You may remember the late effect of the drum
+extending the tympanum of a deaf person to great improvement
+of his hearing, so long as that was beaten upon;
+and I could at present name a friend of mine, who though
+he be exceedingly thick of hearing, by applying a straight
+stick of what length soever, provided it touch the instrument
+and his ear, does perfectly and with great pleasure
+hear every tune that is played: all which, with many more,
+will flow into your excellent work, whilst the argument
+puts me in mind of one Tom Whittal, a student of Christ
+Church, who would needs maintain, that if a hole could
+dexterously be bored through the skull to the brain in the
+midst of the forehead, a man might both see and hear and
+smell without the use of any other organs; but you are
+to know, that this learned problematist was brother to
+him, who, preaching at St. Mary's, Oxford, took his text
+out of the history of Balaam, Numb. xxii., "Am I not
+thine ass?" Dear Sir, pardon this rhapsody of,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Sir, your, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> Some 400 pages from and to him in the most compendious
+edition.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> He thought, writing to Lord Spencer about 1690, that we
+have "few tolerable letters of our own country" excepting&mdash;and
+that only in a fashion&mdash;those of Bacon, Donne and Howell.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> "<i>Odorumque canum vis</i>&mdash;as Lucretius expresses it"&mdash;perhaps
+requires a note. Evelyn ought to have known his Lucretius,
+the first book of which he translated and which he was only
+prevented from completing by some foolish scruples which
+Jeremy Taylor wisely but vainly combated. And Lucretius
+is fond of <i>vis</i> as meaning "quality" or "faculty." But Evelyn
+almost certainly was thinking also, more or less, of Virgil's "odora
+canum vis," <i>Aen.</i> iv. 132.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+<h2>DOROTHY OSBORNE (1627-1695)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>This very delightful lady&mdash;who became the wife of Sir
+William Temple, famous in political and literary history,
+and, by so doing or being, mistress of the household in which
+Swift lived, suffered, but met Stella&mdash;was the daughter of
+Sir Peter Osborne, one of the stoutest of Royalists who, as
+Governor of Guernsey, held its Castle Cornet for years
+against the rebels. Whether she was (in 1627) born there&mdash;her
+father had been made <i>Lieutenant</i> Governor six years
+earlier&mdash;is not known and has been thought unlikely: but
+the present writer (who has danced, and played whist
+within its walls) hopes she was. When we come to know
+her she was living at Chicksands in Bedfordshire and hoping
+to marry Temple, though the course of love ran by no means
+smooth. Attention was first drawn to her letters, and some
+of them were partly printed, in Courtenay's <i>Life</i> of her
+husband&mdash;a book which was reviewed by Macaulay in a
+famous essay, not overlooking Dorothy. But as a body, they
+waited till some half century later, when they were published
+by Judge Parry and received with joy by all fit folk. They
+were written between 1652 and 1654. The first passage is
+in her pleasant mood and touches on a subject&mdash;aviation&mdash;which
+interested that day and interests this. The second
+strikes some people as one of the most charming specimens
+of the love-letter&mdash;written neither in the violent delight
+that has violent end, nor in namby-pamby fashion.<a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>14. <span class="smcap">To Sir William Temple</span></p>
+
+<p>Sir,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>You say I abuse you; and Jane says you abuse
+me when you say you are not melancholy: which
+is to be believed? Neither, I think; for I could not have
+said so positively (as it seems she did) that I should not
+be in town till my brother came back: he was not gone
+when she writ, nor is not yet; and if my brother Peyton
+had come before his going, I had spoiled her prediction.
+But now it cannot be; he goes on Monday or Tuesday at
+farthest. I hope you did truly with me, too, in saying
+that you are not melancholy (though she does not believe
+it). I am thought so, many times, when I am not at all
+guilty on't. How often do I sit in company a whole day,
+and when they are gone am not able to give an account
+of six words that was said, and many times could be so
+much better pleased with the entertainment my own
+thoughts give me, that 'tis all I can do to be so civil as
+not to let them see they trouble me. This may be your
+disease. However, remember you have promised me to
+be careful of yourself, and that if I secure what you have
+entrusted me with, you will answer for the rest. Be this
+our bargain then; and look that you give me as good an
+account of one as I shall give you of t'other. In earnest
+I was strangely vexed to see myself forced to disappoint<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+you so, and felt your trouble and my own too. How often
+I have wished myself with you, though but for a day, for
+an hour: I would have given all the time I am to spend
+here for it with all my heart.</p>
+
+<p>You could not but have laughed if you had seen me
+last night. My brother and Mr. Gibson were talking by
+the fire; and I sat by, but as no part of the company.
+Amongst other things (which I did not at all mind), they
+fell into a discourse of flying; and both agreed it was very
+possible to find out a way that people might fly like birds,
+and despatch their journeys: so I, that had not said a
+word all night, started up at that, and desired they would
+say a little more on't, for I had not marked the beginning;
+but instead of that, they both fell into so violent a laughing,
+that I should appear so much concerned in such an
+art; but they little knew of what use it might have been
+to me. Yet I saw you last night, but 'twas in a dream;
+and before I could say a word to you, or you to me, the
+disorder my joy to see you had put me into awakened me.
+Just now I was interrupted, too, and called away to
+entertain two dumb gentlemen;&mdash;you may imagine
+whether I was pleased to leave my writing to you for
+their company;&mdash;they have made such a tedious visit,
+too; and I am so tired with making of signs and tokens
+for everything I had to say. Good God! how do those
+that live with them always? They are brothers; and
+the eldest is a baronet, has a good estate, a wife and three
+or four children. He was my servant heretofore, and
+comes to see me still for old love's sake; but if he could
+have made me mistress of the world I could not have had
+him; and yet I'll swear he has nothing to be disliked in
+him but his want of tongue, which in a woman might
+have been a virtue.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I sent you a part of <i>Cyrus</i> last week, where you will
+meet with one Doralise in the story of Abradate and
+Panth&eacute;e. The whole story is very good; but the humour
+makes the best part of it. I am of her opinion in most
+things that she says in her character of "L'honnest
+homme" that she is in search of, and her resolution of
+receiving no heart that had been offered to anybody else.
+Pray, tell me how you like her, and what fault you find
+in my Lady Carlisle's letter? Methinks the hand and
+the style both show her a great person, and 'tis writ in
+the way that's now affected by all that pretend to wit and
+good breeding; only, I am a little scandalized to confess
+that she uses that word faithful,&mdash;she that never knew
+how to be so in her life.</p>
+
+<p>I have sent you my picture because you wished for it;
+but, pray, let it not presume to disturb my Lady Sunderland's.
+Put it in some corner where no eyes may find it
+out but yours, to whom it is only intended. 'Tis not a
+very good one, but the best I shall ever have drawn of
+me; for, as my Lady says, my time for pictures is past,
+and therefore I have always refused to part with this,
+because I was sure the next would be a worse. There is
+a beauty in youth that every one has once in their lives;
+and I remember my mother used to say there was never
+anybody (that was not deformed) but were handsome, to
+some reasonable degree, once between fourteen and twenty.
+It must hang with the light on the left hand of it; and
+you may keep it if you please till I bring you the original.
+But then I must borrow it (for 'tis no more mine, if you
+like it), because my brother is often bringing people into
+my closet where it hangs, to show them other pictures
+that are there; and if he miss this long thence, 'twould
+trouble his jealous head.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>15.</p>
+
+<p>Sir,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Who would be kind to one that reproaches one
+so cruelly? Do you think, in earnest, I could be
+satisfied the world should think me a dissembler, full of
+avarice or ambition? No, you are mistaken; but I'll
+tell you what I could suffer, that they should say I married
+where I had no inclination, because my friends thought
+it fit, rather than that I had run wilfully to my own ruin
+in pursuit of a fond passion of my own. To marry for
+love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of
+the thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought
+for an example that it may be done and not repented
+afterwards. Is there anything thought so indiscreet, or
+that makes one more contemptible? 'Tis true that I do
+firmly believe we should be, as you say, <i>toujours les
+mesmes</i>; but if (as you confess) 'tis that which hardly
+happens once in two ages, we are not to expect the world
+should discern we were not like the rest. I'll tell you
+stories another time, you return them so handsomely
+upon me. Well, the next servant I tell you of shall not
+be called a whelp, if 'twere not to give you a stick to beat
+myself with. I would confess that I looked upon the
+impudence of this fellow as a punishment upon me for
+my over care in avoiding the talk of the world; yet the
+case is very different, and no woman shall ever be blamed
+that an inconsolable person pretends to her when she
+gives no allowance to it, whereas none shall 'scape that
+owns a passion, though in return of a person much above
+her. The little tailor that loved Queen Elizabeth was
+suffered to talk out, and none of her Council thought it
+necessary to stop his mouth; but the Queen of Sweden's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+kind letter to the King of Scots was intercepted by her
+own ambassador, because he thought it was not for his
+mistress's honour (at least that was his pretended reason),
+and thought justifiable enough. But to come to my
+Beagle again. I have heard no more of him, though
+I have seen him since; we meet at Wrest again. I do not
+doubt but I shall be better able to resist his importunity
+than his tutor was; but what do you think it is that
+gives him his encouragement? He was told I had
+thought of marrying a gentleman that had not above
+two hundred pound a year, only out of my liking to his
+person. And upon that score his vanity allows him to
+think he may pretend as far as another. Thus you see
+'tis not altogether without reason that I apprehend the
+noise of the world, since 'tis so much to my disadvantage.</p>
+
+<p>Is it in earnest that you say your being there keeps me
+from the town? If so, 'tis very unkind. No, if I had
+gone, it had been to have waited on my neighbour, who
+has now altered her resolution and goes not herself.
+I have no business there, and am so little taken with the
+place that I could sit here seven years without so much
+as thinking once of going to it. 'Tis not likely, as you
+say, that you should much persuade your father to what
+you do not desire he should do; but it is hard if all the
+testimonies of my kindness are not enough to satisfy
+without my publishing to the world that I can forget my
+friends and all my interest to follow my passion; though,
+perhaps, it will admit of a good sense, 'tis that which
+nobody but you or I will give it, and we that are concerned
+in't can only say 'twas an act of great kindness
+and something romance, but must confess it had nothing
+of prudence, discretion, nor sober counsel in't. 'Tis not
+that I expect, by all your father's offers, to bring my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+friends to approve it. I don't deceive myself thus far,
+but I would not give them occasion to say that I hid
+myself from them in the doing it; nor of making my
+action appear more indiscreet than it is. It will concern
+me that all the world should know what fortune you
+have, and upon what terms I marry you, that both may
+not be made to appear ten times worse than they are.
+'Tis the general custom of all people to make those that
+are rich to have more mines of gold than are in the Indies,
+and such as have small fortunes to be beggars. If an
+action take a little in the world, it shall be magnified and
+brought into comparison with what the heroes or senators
+of Rome performed; but, on the contrary, if it be once
+condemned, nothing can be found ill enough to compare
+it with; and people are in pain till they find out some
+extravagant expression to represent the folly on't. Only
+there is this difference, that as all are more forcibly inclined
+to ill than good, they are much apter to exceed in
+detraction than in praises. Have I not reason then to
+desire this from you; and may not my friendship have
+deserved it? I know not; 'tis as you think; but if I be
+denied it, you will teach me to consider myself. 'Tis well
+the side ended here. If I had not had occasion to stop
+there, I might have gone too far, and showed that I had
+more passions than one. Yet 'tis fit you should know all
+my faults, lest you should repent your bargain when
+'twill not be in your power to release yourself; besides,
+I may own my ill-humour to you that cause it; 'tis the
+discontent my crosses in this business have given me
+makes me thus peevish. Though I say it myself, before
+I knew you I was thought as well an humoured young
+person as most in England; nothing displeased, nothing
+troubled me. When I came out of France, nobody knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+me again. I was so altered, from a cheerful humour that
+was always alike, never over merry but always pleased,
+I was grown heavy and sullen, froward and discomposed;
+and that country which usually gives people a jolliness
+and gaiety that is natural to the climate, had wrought in
+me so contrary effects that I was as new a thing to them
+as my clothes. If you find all this to be sad truth hereafter,
+remember that I gave you fair warning.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a ring: it must not be at all wider than this,
+which is rather too big for me than otherwise; but that
+is a good fault, and counted lucky by superstitious people.
+I am not so, though: 'tis indifferent whether there be
+any word in't or not; only 'tis as well without, and will
+make my wearing it the less observed. You must give
+Nan leave to cut a lock of your hair for me, too. Oh,
+my heart! what a sigh was there! I will not tell you
+how many this journey causes; nor the fear and apprehensions
+I have for you. No, I long to be rid of you, am
+afraid you will not go soon enough: do not you believe
+this? No, my dearest, I know you do not, whatever you
+say, you cannot doubt that I am yours.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> The second passage needs little annotation except that Wrest,
+in Bedfordshire, where Dorothy met her importunate lover, was
+the seat of Anthony Grey, Earl of Kent. There is said to be
+a picture there of Sir William Temple&mdash;a copy of Lely's. Wrest
+Park is only a few miles from Chicksands. In the first "Lady
+Carlisle" is Lucy Percy or Hay, a "<i>great person</i>" in many ways&mdash;beauty,
+rank, wit, influence etc.&mdash;but hardly a good one. As for
+"Doralise" Dorothy is quite right. She is one of the brightest
+features of the huge <i>Grand Cyrus</i>. Perhaps it may be just
+necessary to remind readers that "servant" constantly = "lover";
+that "side" refers to the sheet of paper she is using; and
+that "abuse" = "deceive," not "misuse" or "vituperate."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Introduction has dealt rather more fully with Swift
+than with some others: and a further reference to a
+dominant influence or conflict of influences on his letters
+will be found below in the head-note on Thackeray. But
+a little more may be said here. It is rather unfortunate
+that we have not more <i>early</i> letters from him (we have
+some, if only fragments, from Thackeray, and they are no
+small "light"). We should like some concerning that
+curious career at Trinity College, Dublin, which was ended
+<i>speciali gratia</i>, leaving the usual wranglers to their usual
+wrangle whether the last word meant "grace" or "<i>dis</i>grace."
+Others, written in various moods from the time
+when Sir William Temple "spoiled a fine gentleman," and
+Esther Johnson set running a life-long course of <i>un</i>-smooth
+love, would be more welcome still. They would no doubt
+be stumbling-blocks to those apt to stumble, just as the
+existing epistles are: but they would be stepping-stones
+for the wise. As it is, we have to do without them and
+perhaps, like most things that are, it is better. For the
+stumblers are saved the sin of stumbling, and the wise men
+the nuisance of seeing them do it, and trying to set them
+right. And there might have been only more painful
+revelations of the time when, to adjust the words of the
+famous epitaph "fierce indignation still <i>could</i> lacerate the
+heart," that had felt so fondly and so bitterly what it had
+to feel.</p>
+
+<p>What follows is characteristic enough<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> and intelligible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+enough to those who will give their intelligence fair play,
+asking only for information of <i>facts</i>. These latter can be
+supplied at no great length even to those who are unacquainted
+with Swift's biography. "M. D." is the pet
+name for Stella, and her rather mysterious companion Mrs.
+Dingley who lived with her in Dublin and played something
+like the part of the alloys which are used in experimenting
+with some metals.<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> "Presto" is Swift himself.
+"Prior" is the poet. "Sir A. Fountaine" was a Norfolk
+squire and a great collector of artistic things, most of which
+were sold not very long ago. "Sterne" (John) was an
+Irish clergyman and afterwards a bishop, but not of the
+same family as the novelist. "Cousin <i>Dryden</i> Leach"
+reminds us that Swift was also a cousin of Dryden the poet.
+"Oroonoko" refers to Afra Behn's introduction of the
+"noble savage" to English interest. "Patrick" was
+Swift's very unsatisfactory man-servant. "Bernage" a
+French Huguenot refugee. "George Granville," of the
+family of the hero of the <i>Revenge</i>, was a great Tory, a peer
+a little later with the title of Lansdowne, and a rather better
+poet than Johnson thought him. "St. John" and "Harley,"
+if not also "Masham," should not need annotation. Notice
+the seven, (literally seven!) leagued word at the end.
+Swift calls their attention to it when beginning his next
+instalment.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>16. <span class="smcap">To Stella</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">London</span>, January 16, 1710-11.</p>
+
+<p>O faith, young women, I have sent my letter
+N. 13, without one crumb of an answer to any
+of MD's; there's for you now; and yet Presto
+ben't angry faith, not a bit, only he will begin to be in
+pain next Irish post, except he sees MD's little hand-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>writing
+in the glass frame at the bar of St James's Coffeehouse,
+where Presto would never go but for that purpose.
+Presto's at home, God help him, every night from six till
+bed time, and has as little enjoyment or pleasure in life
+at present as any body in the world, although in full
+favour with all the ministry. As hope saved, nothing
+gives Presto any sort of dream of happiness, but a letter
+now and then from his own dearest MD. I love the
+expectation of it, and when it does not come, I comfort
+myself, that I have it yet to be happy with. Yes, faith,
+and when I write to MD, I am happy too; it is just as if
+methinks you were here, and I prating to you, and telling
+you where I have been: Well, says you, Presto, come,
+where have you been to-day? come, let 's hear now.
+And so then I answer; Ford and I were visiting Mr Lewis,
+and Mr Prior, and Prior has given me a fine Plautus, and
+then Ford would have had me dine at his lodgings, and
+so I would not; and so I dined with him at an eating-house;
+which I have not done five times since I came
+here; and so I came home, after visiting Sir Andrew
+Fountaine's mother and sister, and Sir Andrew Fountaine
+is mending, though slowly.</p>
+
+<p>17. I was making, this morning, some general visits,
+and at twelve I called at the coffeehouse for a letter from
+MD; so the man said he had given it to Patrick; then
+I went to the Court of Requests and Treasury to find
+Mr Harley, and after some time spent in mutual reproaches,
+I promised to dine with him; I staid there till seven, then
+called at Sterne's and Leigh's to talk about your box, and
+to have it sent by Smyth. Sterne says he has been making
+inquiries, and will set things right as soon as possible.
+I suppose it lies at Chester, at least I hope so, and only
+wants a lift over to you. Here has little Harrison been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+to complain, that the printer I recommended to him for
+his Tatler is a coxcomb; and yet to see how things will
+happen; for this very printer is my cousin, his name is
+Dryden Leach; did you never hear of Dryden Leach, he
+that prints the Postman? He acted Oroonoko, he's in
+love with Miss Cross.&mdash;Well, so I came home to read my
+letter from Stella, but the dog Patrick was abroad; at
+last he came, and I got my letter; I found another hand
+had superscribed it; when I opened it, I found it written
+all in French, and subscribed Bernage: faith, I was ready
+to fling it at Patrick's head. Bernage tells me, had been
+to desire your recommendation to me to make him a
+captain; and your cautious answer, "That he had as
+much power with me as you," was a notable one; if you
+were here, I would present you to the ministry as a person
+of ability. Bernage should let me know where to write
+to him; this is the second letter I have had without any
+direction; however, I beg I may not have a third, but
+that you will ask him, and send me how I shall direct to
+him. In the mean time, tell him, that if regiments are
+to be raised here, as he says, I will speak to George Granville,
+Secretary at War, to make him a captain; and use
+what other interest I conveniently can. I think that is
+enough, and so tell him, and don't trouble me with his
+letters when I expect them from MD; do you hear, young
+women, write to Presto.</p>
+
+<p>18. I was this morning with Mr Secretary St John, and
+we were to dine at Mr Harley's alone, about some business
+of importance, but there were two or three gentlemen
+there. Mr Secretary and I went together from his office
+to Mr Harley's, and thought to have been very wise; but
+the deuce a bit: the company staid, and more came, and
+Harley went away at seven, and the Secretary and I staid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+with the rest of the company till eleven; I would then
+have had him come away, but he was in for't; and
+though he swore he would come away at that flask, there
+I left him. I wonder at the civility of these people;
+when he saw I would drink no more, he would always
+pass the bottle by me, and yet I could not keep the toad
+from drinking himself, nor he would not let me go neither,
+nor Masham, who was with us. When I got home I found
+a parcel directed to me, and opening it, I found a pamphlet
+written entirely against myself, not by name, but
+against something I writ: it is pretty civil, and affects
+to be so, and I think I will take no notice of it; 'tis against
+something written very lately; and indeed I know not
+what to say, nor do I care; and so you are a saucy rogue
+for losing your money to-day at Stoyte's; to let that
+bungler beat you, fy Stella, an't you ashamed? well,
+I forgive you this once, never do so again; no, noooo.
+Kiss and be friends, sirrah.&mdash;Come, let me go sleep; I go
+earlier to bed than formerly; and have not been out so
+late these two months; but the secretary was in a drinking
+humour. So good night, myownlittledearsaucyinsolentrogues.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> As such, it has commended itself to other selectors. But
+duplication, though it has been sedulously avoided here, is
+sometimes almost inevitable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> <i>I.e.</i> the part of facilitating the operation, and disappearing
+in the results aimed at.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>
+<h2>LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU (1689-1762)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The ratio of importance between life and letters varies a
+good deal with different writers: and the circumstances of
+the life have seldom been of more importance to the letter
+than in the case of "Lady Mary"&mdash;Pierrepont as she was
+born. When she was a girl she held an unusual place in
+the house of her widowed father the Duke of Kingston.
+Her courtship by, or with, or of (one doubts as to the
+preposition) Edward Wortley-Montagu, a descendant of
+Pepys's Lord Sandwich, had peculiarities, and her marriage
+with him more. She was a sort of pet at George the First's
+court; she went with her husband to Constantinople as
+Ambassadress; she introduced inoculation into England;
+she was, under imperfectly known circumstances, first the
+idol and then the abomination of Pope; she lived for more
+than twenty years in France and Italy, having left her
+husband without, apparently, any quarrel between them;
+and she only came home in 1761 to die next year. Like
+her predecessor as Queen of letter-writers, Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; (to whom she was amusingly and rather femininely
+unjust), she had a favourite daughter (who became Lady
+Bute<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a>); but, unlike her, she had a most objectionable son
+who was apparently half mad. There was, however, not
+the slightest madness about Lady Mary&mdash;in fact, most of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+the objectors (perhaps unjust ones) to her have held that
+her head was very much better than her heart. Her most
+popular letters have usually been the Turkish ones, and,
+at the other end of her life, her Italian descriptions: but
+selections almost invariably pitch on the curious early one
+in which she, so to speak, "proposes" to her future husband
+rather more than, or at least as much as, she accepts his
+proposal. I prefer, both as less popularised and as more
+unique still, the following most business-like<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> plan and
+programme of an elopement. Like Mr. Foker's fight with
+the post-boy it "didn't come off" as first planned; but
+Fortune favoured it later.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>17. <span class="smcap">To Mr. Wortley-Montagu</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Saturday morning (August, 1712)</p>
+
+<p>I writ you a letter last night in some passion. I begin
+to fear again; I own myself a coward.&mdash;You made
+no reply to one part of my letter concerning my
+fortune. I am afraid you flatter yourself that my F.
+[father] may be at length reconciled and brought to
+reasonable terms. I am convinced, by what I have often
+heard him say, speaking of other cases like this, he never
+will. The fortune he has engaged to give with me, was
+settled on my B. [brother's] marriage, on my sister and
+on myself; but in such a manner, that it was left in his
+power to give it all to either of us, or divide it as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+thought fit. He has given it all to me. Nothing remains
+for my sister, but the free bounty of my F. [father] from
+what he can save; which, notwithstanding the greatness
+of his estate, may be very little. Possibly after I have
+disobliged him so much, he may be glad to have her so
+easily provided for, with money already raised; especially
+if he has a design to marry himself, as I hear. I do not
+speak this that you should not endeavour to come to
+terms with him, if you please; but I am fully persuaded
+it will be to no purpose. He will have a very good answer
+to make:&mdash;that I suffered this match to proceed; that
+I made him make a very silly figure in it; that I have
+let him spend &pound;400 in wedding-cloaths; all which I saw
+without saying any thing. When I first pretended to
+oppose this match, he told me he was sure I had some
+other design in my head; I denied it with truth. But
+you see how little appearance there is of that truth. He
+proceeded with telling me that he never would enter into
+treaty with another man, &amp;c., and that I should be sent
+immediately into the North to stay there; and, when he
+died, he would only leave me an annuity of &pound;400. I had
+not courage to stand this view, and I submitted to what
+he pleased. He will now object against me,&mdash;why, since
+I intended to marry in this manner, I did not persist in
+my first resolution; that it would have been as easy for
+me to run away from T. [Thoresby] as from hence; and
+to what purpose did I put him, and the gentleman I was
+to marry, to expences, &amp;c.? He will have a thousand
+plausible reasons for being irreconcileable, and 'tis very
+probable the world will be of his side. Reflect now for
+the last time in what manner you must take me. I shall
+come to you with only a night-gown and petticoat, and
+that is all you will get with me. I told a lady of my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+friends what I intend to do. You will think her a very
+good friend when I tell you she has proffered to lend us
+her house if we would come there the first night. I did
+not accept of this till I had let you know it. If you think
+it more convenient to carry me to your lodgings, make
+no scruple of it. Let it be where it will: if I am your
+wife I shall think no place unfit for me where you are.
+I beg we may leave London next morning, wherever you
+intend to go. I should wish to go out of England if it
+suits with your affairs. You are the best judge of your
+father's temper. If you think it would be obliging to
+him, or necessary for you, I will go with you immediately
+to ask his pardon and his blessing. If that is not proper
+at first, I think the best scheme is going to the Spa. When
+you come back, you may endeavour to make your father
+admit of seeing me, and treat with mine (though I persist
+in thinking it will be to no purpose). But I cannot think
+of living in the midst of my relations and acquaintance
+after so unjustifiable a step:&mdash;unjustifiable to the world,&mdash;but
+I think I can justify myself to myself. I again beg
+you to hire a coach to be at the door early Monday morning,
+to carry us some part of our way, wherever you
+resolve our journey shall be. If you determine to go to
+that lady's house, you had better come with a coach and
+six at seven o'clock tomorrow. She and I will be in the
+balcony that looks on the road: you have nothing to do
+but to stop under it, and we will come down to you. Do
+in this what you like best. After all, think very seriously.
+Your letter, which will be waited for, is to determine
+everything. I forgive you a coarse expression in your
+last, which, however, I wish had not been there. You
+might have said something like it without expressing it
+in that manner; but there was so much complaisance in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+the rest of it I ought to be satisfied. You can shew me
+no goodness I shall not be sensible of. However, think
+again, and resolve never to think of me if you have the
+least doubt, or that it is likely to make you uneasy in
+your fortune. I believe to travel is the most likely way
+to make a solitude agreeable, and not tiresome: remember
+you have promised it.</p>
+
+<p>'Tis something odd for a woman that brings nothing to
+expect anything; but after the way of education, I dare
+not pretend to live but in some degree suitable to it.
+I had rather die than return to a dependancy upon relations
+I have disobliged. Save me from that fear if you
+love me. If you cannot, or think I ought not to expect
+it, be sincere and tell me so. 'Tis better I should not be
+yours at all, than, for a short happiness, involve myself
+in ages of misery. I hope there will never be occasion
+for this precaution; but, however, 'tis necessary to make
+it. I depend entirely on your honour, and I cannot
+suspect you of any way doing wrong. Do not imagine
+I shall be angry at any thing you can tell me. Let it be
+sincere; do not impose on a woman that leaves all things
+for you.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> The likeness, however, ended with the favouritism: for
+Madame de Grignan, in spite of good looks and good wits, was
+apparently detested by everybody, except her mother, and
+deserved it: while nobody has anything to say against Lady
+Bute.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> It is, of course, not <i>merely</i> business-like&mdash;the mixture of
+something else makes it rather fascinating. They were curiously
+fond of elopements in the eighteenth century, Sheridan's satire
+in <i>The Rivals</i> having ample justification. Nor was this merely
+due to the more severe exercise of paternal authority. For they
+often preferred (as the philosophical parent of the celebrated
+Mrs. Greville remarked when his daughter ran away with Mr. G.)
+to "get out of the window when there was not the slightest
+objection to their passing through the door."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2>PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF<br />
+CHESTERFIELD (1694-1773)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As was suggested in the Introduction, where perhaps
+enough has been said of his actual letters, the fourth Earl
+of Chesterfield is too commonly known, or rather <i>mis</i>known,
+only by Johnson's refusal of his patronage and condemnation
+of his manners and morals, by Dickens's caricature,
+and by Thackeray's not untrue but merely fragmentary
+sketch of him as a gambler. Therefore, though these
+preliminary notes are not as a rule biographical, this may
+be one of the exceptions; for his life was anything but
+that of a mere idler and <i>grand Seigneur</i>. He entered the
+House of Commons before he was of age, and had much
+to do with political and literary as well as Court society
+before, in 1725, he succeeded to the peerage. A year or
+two afterwards he went as ambassador to the Hague, a
+post which he held, doing some important business, for
+four years. On coming home he became a formidable
+opponent of Walpole, and at one time led the opposition
+in the Upper House. He was a most successful Viceroy
+in Ireland at the difficult period of the "'45," and a
+judicious "Secretary for the North" after it. He conducted
+the reform of the Calendar through Parliament,
+and only gave up active participation in home politics
+because of his increasing deafness. In foreign affairs he
+was an adroit and successful diplomatist, and made an
+early and remarkably clear-sighted anticipation of the
+French Revolution. It is not extravagant to say that, if
+he had had his fortune and position to make, he might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+been one of the foremost men of his time in politics or letters
+or both; and that he was not far below such rank in either.
+The following letter is one of the most characteristic of
+those at which it has been the fashion to sneer. All one
+can say of it is, "What a blessing it would be if a good
+many people in the twentieth century, and in places varying
+from the streets to the House of Commons, would obey at
+least some of its precepts!"</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>18. <span class="smcap">Lord Chesterfield to his Son</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">London</span>. Sept. 22, O.S., 1749</p>
+
+<p>Dear Boy,</p>
+
+<p>If I had faith in philters and love potions,
+I should suspect that you had given Sir Charles
+Williams some, by the manner in which he speaks of you,
+not only to me, but to everybody else. I will not repeat
+to you what he says of the extent and correctness of your
+knowledge, as it might either make you vain, or persuade
+you that you had already enough of what nobody can
+have too much. You will easily imagine how many
+questions I asked and how narrowly I sifted him upon
+your subject: he answered me, and I daresay with truth,
+just as I could have wished; till, satisfied entirely with
+his accounts of your character and learning, I inquired
+into other matters, intrinsically indeed of less consequence,
+but still of great consequence to every man, and of more
+to you than to almost any man; I mean, your address,
+manners and air. To these questions, the same truth
+which he had observed before, obliged him to give me
+much less satisfactory answers. And, as he thought himself
+in friendship both to you and me, obliged to tell me
+the disagreeable as well as the agreeable truths, upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+the same principle I think myself obliged to repeat them
+to you.</p>
+
+<p>He told me, then, that in company you were frequently
+most <i>provokingly</i> inattentive, absent, and <i>distrait</i>. That
+you came into a room, and presented yourself very awkwardly;
+that at table you constantly threw down knives,
+forks, napkins, bread, etc., and that you neglected your
+person and dress, to a degree unpardonable at any age,
+and much more so at yours.</p>
+
+<p>These things, however immaterial soever they may
+seem to people who do not know the world and the nature
+of mankind, give me, who know them to be exceedingly
+material, very great concern. I have long distrusted you,
+and therefore frequently admonished you upon these
+articles; and I tell you plainly, that I shall not be easy
+till I hear a very different account of them. I know of
+no one thing more offensive to a company, than that
+inattention and <i>distraction</i>. It is showing them the
+utmost contempt; and people never forgive contempt.
+No man is <i>distrait</i> with the man he fears, or the woman
+he loves; which is a proof that every man can get the
+better of that <i>distraction</i> when he thinks it worth his
+while to do so; and, take my word for it, it is always
+worth his while. For my own part, I would rather be in
+company with a dead man than with an absent one; for
+if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he shows
+me no contempt; whereas the absent man, silently indeed,
+but very plainly, tells me that he does not think
+me worth his attention. Besides, can an absent man
+make any observations upon the characters, customs, and
+manners of the company? No. He may be in the best
+companies of his lifetime (if they will admit him, which,
+if I were they, I would not), and never be one jot the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+wiser. I never will converse with an absent man; one
+may as well talk with a deaf one. It is, in truth, a practical
+blunder, to address ourselves to a man, who we see
+plainly neither hears, minds, nor understands us. Moreover,
+I aver that no man is, in any degree, fit for either
+business or conversation, who cannot, and does not, direct
+and command his attention to the present object, be that
+what it will.</p>
+
+<p>You know, by experience, that I grudge no expense in
+your education, but I will positively not keep you a
+flapper. You may read, in Dr. Swift, the description of
+these flappers, and the use they were of to your friends
+the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) are so taken
+up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak,
+nor attend to the discourses of others, without being
+roused by some external taction upon the organs of
+speech and hearing; for which reason, those people who
+are able to afford it, always keep a flapper in their family,
+as one of their domestics, nor ever walk about, or make
+visits, without him. This flapper is likewise employed
+diligently to attend his master in his walks, and, upon
+occasion, to give a soft flap upon his eyes; because he is
+always so wrapt up in cogitation, that he is in manifest
+danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his
+head against every post, and, in the streets, of jostling
+others, or being jostled into the kennel himself. If
+<i>Christian</i> will undertake this province into the bargain,
+with all my heart; but I will not allow him any increase
+of wages upon that score.</p>
+
+<p>In short, I give you fair warning, that when we meet,
+if you are absent in mind, I will soon be absent in body;
+for it will be impossible for me to stay in the room; and
+if at table you throw down your knife, plate, bread, etc.,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+and hack the wing of a chicken for half an hour, without
+being able to cut it off, and your sleeve all the time in
+another dish, I must rise from table to escape the fever
+you would certainly give me. Good God! How I should
+be shocked if you came into my room, for the first time,
+with two left legs, presenting yourself with all the graces
+and dignity of a tailor, and your clothes hanging upon
+you like those in Monmouth Street, upon tenter-hooks!
+Whereas I expect, nay require, to see you present yourself
+with the easy and gentle air of a man of fashion who
+has kept good company. I expect you not only well
+dressed, but very well dressed; I expect a gracefulness
+in all your motions, and something particularly engaging
+in your address. All this I expect, and all these it is in
+your power, by care and attention, to make me find; but,
+to tell you the plain truth, if I do not find it, we shall
+not converse very much together; for I cannot stand inattention
+and awkwardness; it would endanger my health.</p>
+
+<p>You have often seen, and I have as often made you
+observe, L[yttelton]'s distinguished inattention and awkwardness.
+Wrapped up like a Laputan in intense thought,
+and possibly sometimes in no thought at all&mdash;which, I believe,
+is very often the case with absent people&mdash;he does
+not know his most intimate acquaintance at sight, or
+answers them as if they were at cross purposes. He
+leaves his hat in one room, his sword in another, and
+would leave his shoes in a third, if his buckles, although
+awry, did not save them; his legs and arms, by his
+awkward management of them, seem to have undergone
+the <i>question extraordinaire</i>; and his head, always hanging
+upon one or other of his shoulders, seems to have received
+the first stroke upon a block. I sincerely value and
+esteem him for his parts, learning, and virtue; but, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+the soul of me, I cannot love him in company. This will
+be universally the case, in common life, of every inattentive
+awkward man, let his real merit and knowledge be
+ever so great.</p>
+
+<p>When I was of your age, I desired to shine, as far as
+I was able, in every part of life; and was as attentive, to
+my manners, my dress, and my air, in company on
+evenings, as to my books, and my tutor in the mornings.
+A young fellow should be ambitious to shine in everything;
+and, of the two, rather overdo than underdo.
+These things are by no means trifles; they are of infinite
+consequence to those who are to be thrown into the great
+world, and who would make a figure or a fortune in it.
+It is not sufficient to deserve well, one must please well
+too. Awkward, disagreeable merit, will never carry
+anybody far. Wherever you find a good dancing master,
+pray let him put you upon your haunches; not so much
+for the sake of dancing, as for coming into a room and
+presenting yourself genteelly and gracefully. Women,
+whom you ought to endeavour to please, cannot forgive
+a vulgar and awkward air and gestures; <i>il leur faut du
+brillant</i>. The generality of men are pretty like them, and
+are equally taken by the same exterior graces.</p>
+
+<p>I am very glad that you have received the diamond
+buckles safe: All I desire in return for them, is, that
+they may be buckled even upon your feet, and that your
+stockings may not hide them. I should be sorry you were
+an egregious fop; but I protest that, of the two, I would
+rather have you a fop than a sloven. I think negligence
+in my own dress, even at my age, when certainly I expect
+no advantages from my dress, would be indecent with
+regard to others. I have done with fine clothes; but
+I will have my plain clothes fit me, and made like other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+people's. In the evenings I recommend to you the company
+of women of fashion, who have a right to attention,
+and will be paid it. Their company will smooth your
+manners, and give you a habit of attention and respect;
+of which you will find the advantage among men.</p>
+
+<p>My plan for you, from the beginning, has been to make
+you shine, equally in the learned and in the polite world;
+The former part is almost completed to my wishes, and
+will, I am persuaded, in a little time more, be quite so.
+The latter part is still in your power to complete; and
+I flatter myself that you will do it, or else the former part
+will avail you very little; especially in your deportment,
+where the exterior address and graces do half the business;
+they must be harbingers of your merit, or your merit will
+be very coldly received: all can, and do judge of the
+former, few of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Harte tells me that you have grown very much
+since your illness: if you get up to five feet ten, or even
+nine inches, your figure will, probably, be a good one; and
+if well dressed and genteel, will probably please; which is
+a much greater advantage to a man than people commonly
+think. Lord Bacon calls it a letter of recommendation.</p>
+
+<p>I would wish you to be an <i>omnis homo</i>, <i>l'homme universel</i>.
+You are nearer it, if you please, than ever anybody
+was at your age; and if you will but, for the course of
+this next year only, exert your whole attention to your
+studies in the morning, and to your address, manners, air,
+and <i>tournure</i> in the evenings, you will be the man I wish
+you, and the man that is rarely seen.</p>
+
+<p>Our letters go, at best, so irregularly and so often miscarry
+totally, that, for greater security, I repeat the same
+things. So, though, I acknowledged by last post Mr
+Harte's letter of the 8th September, N.S., I acknowledge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
+it again by this to you. If this should find you still at
+Verona, let it inform you, that I wish you to set out soon
+for Naples; unless Mr. Harte should think it better for
+you to stay at Verona, or any other place on this side
+Rome, till you go there for the Jubilee. Nay, if he likes
+it better, I am very willing that you should go directly
+from Verona to Rome; for you cannot have too much of
+Rome, whether upon account of the language, the curiosities,
+or the company. My only reason for mentioning
+Naples, is for the sake of the climate, upon account of
+your health; but, if Mr. Harte thinks your health is now
+so well restored as to be above climate, he may steer your
+course wherever he thinks proper; and, for aught I know,
+your going directly to Rome, and consequently staying
+there so much the longer, may be as well as anything else.
+I think you and I cannot put our affairs into better hands
+than in Mr. Harte's; and I will take his infallibility
+against the Pope's, with some odds on his side. <i>A propos</i>
+of the Pope; remember to be presented to him before
+you leave Rome, and go through the necessary ceremonies
+for it, whether of kissing his slipper or...; for I would
+never deprive myself of anything I wanted to do or see,
+by refusing to comply with an established custom. When
+I was in Catholic countries, I never declined kneeling in
+their churches at the elevation, nor elsewhere, when the
+Host went by. It is a complaisance due to the custom
+of the place, and by no means, as some silly people have
+imagined, an implied approbation of their doctrine.
+Bodily attitudes and situations are things so very indifferent
+in themselves, that I would quarrel with nobody
+about them. It may indeed be improper for Mr. Harte
+to pay that tribute of complaisance, upon account of his
+character.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This letter is a very long, and possibly a very tedious
+one; but my interest for your perfection is so great, and
+particularly at this critical and decisive period of your
+life, that I am only afraid of omitting, but never of repeating,
+or dwelling too long upon anything that I think
+may be of the least use to you. Have the same anxiety
+for yourself that I have for you, and all will do well.
+Adieu, my dear child!</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>GEORGE BALLARD (1706-1755)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The extreme wickedness of reviewers has been a conviction
+with many authors&mdash;who have sometimes, it would
+seem, succumbed to it themselves and retaliated in reviewing
+others. The following letter to Dr. Lyttelton, Dean of
+Exeter, is a very early (1753) and not unamusing example
+of this conviction: and is given as such, though the writer
+has no wide fame. His history is, however, interesting and
+shows, among other things, how entirely erroneous is the
+idea that till recently (and even now to some extent)
+opportunities of showing themselves able to profit by
+education were and are denied to the "lower classes" in
+England. Ballard was apprenticed to a staymaker
+("habit-maker" as others say) at Chipping-Campden, but
+betook himself in his leisure hours to the study of Anglo-Saxon.
+Hearing of which fact the gentlemen of the local
+hunt (the boozy squire-tyrants of popular tradition) subscribed
+for an annuity of &pound;100 a year to him, but he would
+only accept &pound;60. With this he went up to Oxford to enjoy
+the Bodleian, was made a "clerk" at Magdalen and later
+an esquire-bedell to the University. He did much good
+work of the antiquarian kind, and died a year or two after
+writing this letter, having (one hopes) relieved himself by
+his protest and been consoled by a kind answer from
+Lyttelton.<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>19. <span class="smcap">To Dr. Lyttelton, Dean of Exeter</span></p>
+
+<p class='center'><span class="smcap">A Defence of the History of Learned Ladies</span></p>
+
+<p>Revd. and Hond. Sir,</p>
+
+<p>My best acknowledgments are due for the
+favour of two epistles; the first of which I received
+a few minutes after my last set forward for Exeter.
+I would have answered it immediately, but that I thought
+a little respite might be agreeable, before I gave you the
+trouble of another long letter.</p>
+
+<p>The day before I received your first epistle, a Gent. of
+my acquaintance brought me the <i>Monthly Review</i> for
+February, that I might see what the candid and genteel
+authors of that work had said of mine. They observe to
+the publick, that <i>I have said</i> C. Tishem was so skilled in
+the Greek Tongue, that she could read Galen in its original,
+which very few Physicians are able to do. Whether this
+was done maliciously, in order to bring the wrath of the
+&AElig;sculapians upon me, or inadvertently, I cannot say:
+but I may justly affirm, that they have used me very ill
+in that affair; since if they had read with attention,
+which they ought to have done before they attempted to
+give a character of the Book, they must have known that
+the whole account of that lady (which is but one page)
+is not mine, but borrowed with due acknowledgment from
+the <i>General Dictionary</i>. They are likewise pleased to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+inform the world that I have been rather too industrious
+in the undertaking, having introduced several women who
+hardly deserved a place in the work. I did not do this
+for want of materials; neither did I do it rashly, without
+advising with others of superior judgment in those affairs,
+of which number Mr. Professor Ward was one. But those
+pragmatical Censors seem to have but little acquaintance
+with those studies, or otherwise they might have observed
+that all our general Biographers, as Leland, Bale, Pits,
+Wood, and Tanner, have trod the very same steps; and
+have given an account of all the authors they could meet
+with, good and bad, just as they found them: and yet,
+I have never heard of anyone that had courage or ill-nature
+enough, to endeavour to expose them for it. While
+I was ruminating on these affairs, three or four letters
+came to my hands, and perceiving one of them come from
+my worthy friend the Dean of Exeter, I eagerly broke it
+open, and was perfectly astonished to find myself charged
+with <i>party zeal</i> in my book; and that from thence the
+most candid reader might conclude the author to be both
+a Church and State Tory. But after having thoroughly
+considered all the passages objected to, and not finding
+the least tincture of either Whig or Tory principles contained
+in them, I began to cheer up my drooping spirits,
+in hopes that I might possibly out-live my supposed
+crime; but, alas! to my still greater confusion! when
+I opened my next letter from a Tory acquaintance, I was
+like one thunderstruck at the contents of it. He discharges
+his passionate but ill-grounded resentment upon
+me most furiously. He tells me, he did not imagine
+Magdalen College could have produced such a rank Whig.
+He reproaches me with want of due esteem for the Stuart
+Family, to whom he says I have shewn a deadly hatred,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+and he gives me, as he imagines, three flagrant instances
+of it. 1. That I have unseasonably and maliciously
+printed a letter of Queen Elizabeth's, in order to blacken
+the memory of Mary Queen of Scots, and that too, at a
+time when her character began to shine as bright as the
+Sun. 2dly. That I have endeavoured to make her memory
+odious, by representing her as wanting natural affection
+to her only son, in my note at p. 162, where he says I have
+printed part of a Will, &amp;c. And 3dly, tho' she was cut
+off in such a barbarous and unprecedented manner, yet
+she has fallen unlamented by me. I am likewise charged
+with having an affection to Puritanism; the reasons for
+which are, my giving the Life of a Puritan Bishop's Lady,
+which it seems need not have been done by me, had I not
+had a particular regard for her, since it had been done
+before by Goodwin who reprinted her Devotions. And
+not content with this, I have blemished my book with the
+memoirs of a Dissenting teacher's wife, and have been
+kind enough to heighten even the character given her by
+her indulgent husband: and that I am very fond of
+quoting Fox and Burnet upon all occasions. These are
+thought strong indications of the above-mentioned charge.
+It may be thought entirely unnecessary to answer any of
+the objections from Exeter, after having given you this
+Summary of my kind Friend's Candid Epistle; but to
+you, Sir, to whom I could disclose the very secrets of my
+soul, I will endeavour to say a word or two upon this
+subject, and make you my Confessor upon this occasion;
+and I will do it with as much sincerity, as if I lay on my
+death-bed. Before I was fourteen years old, I read over
+Fox's Acts and Monuments of the Church, and several of
+the best books of Polemical Divinity, which strongly
+fortified me in the Protestant Religion; and gave me the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+greatest abhorrence to Popery. And soon after I perused
+Mercurius Rusticus, The Eleventh Persecution, Lloyd,
+Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, and many others, which
+gave me almost as bad an opinion of the Dissenters. But
+then I learned in my childhood <i>to live in Charity with all
+Men</i>, and I have used my best endeavours to put this
+doctrine in practice all my life long. I never thought ill,
+or quarrelled with any man merely because he had been
+educated in principles different to mine; and yet I have
+been acquainted with many papists, dissenters, &amp;c. and
+if I found any of them learned, ingenuous, and modest,
+I always found my heart well-disposed for contracting a
+firm friendship with them: and notwithstanding that,
+I dare believe that all those people will, with joint consent,
+vouch for me, that I have ever been steady in my own
+principles.</p>
+
+<p>I can truly affirm that never any one engaged in such
+a work, with an honester heart, or executed it with more
+unbiassed integrity, than I have done. And indeed, I take
+the unkind censures passed upon me by the furious uncharitable
+zealots of both parties, to be the strongest
+proof of it. And after all, I dare challenge any man,
+whether Protestant, Papist, or Dissenter, Whig or Tory,
+(and I have drawn up and published memoirs of women
+who professed all those principles) to prove me guilty of
+partiality, or to shew that I have made any uncharitable
+reflections on any person, and whenever that is done,
+I will faithfully promise to make a public recantation.
+I wish, Sir, you would point out to me any one unbecoming
+word or expression which has fell from me on Bishop
+Burnet. Had I had the least inclination to have lessened
+his character, I did not want proper materials to have
+done it. I have in my possession two original letters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+from Bishop Gibson and Mr Norris of Bemerton, to Dr
+Charlett, which, if published, would lessen your too great
+esteem for him. And what, I beseech you, Sir, have
+I said in praise of Mrs Hopton and her pious and useful
+labours, which they do not well deserve, and which can
+possibly give any just offence to any good man? I dare
+not censure or condemn a good thing merely because it
+borders upon the Church of Rome. I rather rejoice that
+she retains any thing I can fairly approve. Should
+I attempt to do this, might I not condemn the greater
+part of our Liturgy, &amp;c.? and should I not stand self-condemned
+for so doing? I cannot for my life perceive
+that I have said any thing of that excellent woman, which
+she does not merit; and I must beg leave to say that
+I think her letter to F. Turbeville deserves to be wrote
+in letters of gold, and ought to be carefully read and
+preserved by all Protestants. Mary Queen of Scots fell
+under my notice, no otherwise than as a learned woman.
+The affairs you mention would by no means suit my
+peaceable temper. I was too well acquainted with the
+warm disputes, and fierce engagement both of domestic
+and foreign writers on that head, once to touch upon the
+subject. And indeed, unless I had been the happy discoverer
+of some secret springs of action which would have
+given new information to the public, it would have been
+excessive folly in me to intermeddle in an affair of so
+tender a nature, and of so great importance.</p>
+
+<p>I have often blamed my dear friend Mr. Brome for
+destroying his valuable collections, but I now cease to
+wonder at it. He spent his leisure hours pleasantly and
+inoffensively, and when old age came on, which not only
+abates thirst, but oftentimes gives a disrelish to these and
+almost all other things, which do not help to make our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+passage into eternity more easy, he then destroyed them
+(I dare believe) in order to prevent the malicious reflections
+of an ill-natured world.</p>
+
+<p>I have always been a passionate lover of History and
+Antiquity, Biography, and Northern Literature: and as
+I have ever hated idleness, so I have in my time filled
+many hundred sheets with my useless scribble, the greater
+part of which I will commit to the flames shortly, to
+prevent their giving me any uneasiness in my last
+moments.<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a></p>
+
+<p>[May 22, 1753.]</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> Ballard's <i>Memoirs of Learned Ladies of Great Britain who
+have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the Learned
+Languages Arts &amp; Sciences</i>, appeared at Oxford in 4to (1752)
+and 8vo (1775). It contains some sixty lives, the most noteworthy
+names being those of Queens Elizabeth and Mary of
+Scotland, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Countess of Richmond
+(<i>the</i> "Lady Margaret"), the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady
+Winchelsea, the two Countesses of Pembroke ("Sidney's sister"
+and Anne Clifford), Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners, Dryden's
+Anne Killigrew, Dorothy Pakington (the alleged author of
+<i>The Whole Duty of Man</i>), and "the matchless Orinda."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> Perhaps a note should be added on "Mrs. Hopton" and
+"F. Turbe(r)ville." The former, born Susanna Harvey (1627-1709),
+was the wife of a Welsh judge, and wrote devotional works.
+The latter, Henry T. (d. 1678: the "F" of text is of course
+"Father"), was a writer of doctrinal and controversial manuals
+on the Roman side.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The chief thing to add to what has been said of Gray in
+the Introduction is something that may draw attention to
+a curious feature of his letters, not there distinctly noticed.
+Letters, it must be sufficiently seen even from this little
+book, have a curious <i>variety</i> of relation to the characters,
+personal and literary, of their writers. Sometimes they
+show us phases entirely or almost entirely concealed in the
+published works; sometimes again, without definitely
+revealing new aspects, they complete and enforce the old;
+while, in yet a third, though perhaps the smallest, class of
+instances, they are as it were results of the same governing
+formula as that of the published works themselves, the
+difference lying almost wholly in the subjects and in the
+methods and circumstances of treatment. Gray belongs to
+this last division. There is not, of course, in his letters the
+same severity of discipline and restriction of utterance, that
+we find in his poems. But that, in letters, was impossible&mdash;at
+least in letters that should supply tolerable reading.
+Yet the same general principle, which was somewhat
+exaggerated in the phrase about his "never speaking out,"
+appears in them. There is always a certain restraint (at
+least in all that have been published) and it would probably
+have extended in proportion to others, however little their
+subject might seem compatible with it. In what we have
+it gives a curious <i>seasoning</i>&mdash;something which preserves as
+well as flavours like salt or vinegar. Of those which follow
+the first is an early one. Mason's apologetic note is to the
+effect that it "may appear whimsical" but it gives him
+an opportunity of remarking that Mr. Gray was "extremely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+skilled in the customs of the ancient Romans," both utterances
+being characteristic, to some extent of the time but
+to a greater of the writer. The second letter, to Gray's
+most intimate friend Dr. Wharton, and more than a quarter
+of a century later, is a good example of the <i>variety</i> of these
+epistles&mdash;scenery, literature, politics, science, gossip and
+what not, being all dealt with.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>20. <span class="smcap">To Richard West [extract]</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Rome</span>, May, 1740.</p>
+
+<p>I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal
+fatigued; for you know the Appian is somewhat
+tiresome. We dined at Pompey's; he indeed was
+gone for a few days to his Tusculan, but, by the care of
+his Villicus, we made an admirable meal. We had the
+dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock, a dish of thrushes, a
+noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and some
+conchylia of the Lake with garum sauce: For my part
+I never eat better at Lucullus's table. We drank half-a-dozen
+cyathi a-piece of ancient Alban to Pholo&euml;'s health;
+and after bathing, and playing an hour at ball, we mounted
+our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the
+temple. The priests there entertained us with an account
+of a wonderful shower of bird's eggs that had fallen two
+days before, which had no sooner touched the ground, but
+they were converted into gudgeons; as also that, the night
+past, a dreadful voice had been heard out of the Adytum,
+which spoke Greek during a full half-hour, but nobody
+understood it. But quitting my Romanities, to your
+great joy and mine, let me tell you in plain English, that
+we come from Albano. The present town lies within the
+inclosure of Pompey's Villa in ruins. The Appian way
+runs through it, by the side of which, a little farther, is a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+large old tomb, with five pyramids upon it, which the
+learned suppose to be the burying-place of the family,
+because they do not know whose it can be else. But the
+vulgar assure you it is the sepulchre of the Curiatii, and
+by that name (such is their power) it goes. One drives
+to Castle Gandolfo, a house of the Pope's, situated on the
+top of one of the Collinette, that forms a brim to the basin,
+commonly called the Alban lake. It is seven miles round;
+and directly opposite to you, on the other side, rises the
+Mons Albanus, much taller than the rest, along whose side
+are still discoverable (not to common eyes) certain little
+ruins of the old Alba Longa. They had need be very
+little, as having been nothing but ruins ever since the
+days of Tullus Hostilius. On its top is a house of the
+Constable Colonna's, where stood the temple of Jupiter
+Latialis. At the foot of the hill Gandolfo, are the famous
+outlets of the lake, built with hewn stone, a mile and a
+half under ground. Livy you know, amply informs us of
+the foolish occasion of this expence, and gives me this
+opportunity of displaying all my erudition, that I may
+appear considerable in your eyes. This is the prospect
+from one window of the palace. From another you have
+the whole Campagna, the City, Antium, and the Tyrrhene
+sea (twelve miles distant) so distinguishable, that you may
+see the vessels sailing upon it. All this is charming. Mr.
+Walpole says, our memory sees more than our eyes in
+this country. Which is extremely true; since, for
+realities, Windsor or Richmond Hill is infinitely preferable
+to Albano or Frescati. I am now at home, and
+going to the window to tell you it is the most beautiful
+of Italian nights, which, in truth, are but just begun (so
+backward has the spring been here, and every where else,
+they say) There is a moon! there are stars for you!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+Do not you hear the fountain? Do not you smell the
+orange flowers? That building yonder is the convent of
+S. Isidore; and that eminence, with the cypress trees and
+pines upon it, the top of M. Quirinal. This is all true,
+and yet my prospect is not two hundred yards in length.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>21. <span class="smcap">To Wharton</span></p>
+
+<p>Dear Doctor</p>
+
+<p>Whatever my pen may do, I am sure my
+thoughts expatiate nowhere oftener or with
+more pleasure, than to Old-Park. I hope you have made
+my peace with Miss Deborah. it is certain, whether her
+name were in my letter or not, she was as present to my
+memory, as the rest of the little family, &amp; I desire you
+would present her with two kisses in my name, &amp; one a-piece
+to all the others: for I shall take the liberty to kiss
+them all (great &amp; small) as you are to be my proxy.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of the rain, w<sup>ch</sup> I think continued with very
+short intervals till the beginning of this month, &amp; quite
+effaced the summer from the year, I made a shift to pass
+May &amp; June not disagreeably in Kent. I was surprised
+at the beauty of the road to Canterbury, which (I know
+not why) had not struck me in the same manner before.
+The whole country is a rich and well-cultivated garden,
+orchards, cherry-grounds, hop-gardens, intermix'd with
+corn &amp; frequent villages, gentle risings cover'd with wood,
+and everywhere the Thames and Medway breaking in upon
+the Landscape with all their navigation. It was indeed
+owing to the bad weather, that the whole scene was dress'd
+in that tender emerald-green, w<sup>ch</sup> one usually sees only for
+a fortnight in the opening of spring, &amp; this continued till
+I left the country. My residence was eight miles east of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+Canterbury in a little quiet valley on the skirts of Barhamdown.
+In these parts the whole soil is chalk, and whenever
+it holds up, in half an hour it is dry enough to walk
+out. I took the opportunity of three or four days fine
+weather to go into the Isle of Thanet, saw Margate (w<sup>ch</sup>
+is Bartholomew-Fair by the sea side), Ramsgate, &amp; other
+places there, and so came by Sandwich, Deal, Dover,
+Folkstone, &amp; Hithe, back again. The coast is not like
+Hartlepool: there are no rocks, but only chalky cliffs of
+no great height, till you come to Dover. There indeed
+they are noble &amp; picturesque, and the opposite coasts of
+France begin to bound your view, w<sup>ch</sup> was left before to
+range unlimited by anything but the horizon: yet it is
+by no means a <i>shipless</i> sea, but everywhere peopled with
+white sails &amp; vessels of all sizes in motion. And take
+notice (except in the Isle, w<sup>ch</sup> is all corn-fields, and has
+very little inclosure) there are in all places hedgerows &amp; tall
+trees even within a few yards of the beach. Particularly
+Hithe stands on an eminence cover'd with wood. I shall
+confess we had fires of a night (ay, &amp; a day too) several
+times even in June: but don't go &amp; take advantage of
+this, for it was the most untoward year that ever I remember.</p>
+
+<p>Your Friend Rousseau (I doubt) grows tired of M<sup>r</sup>
+Davenport and Derbyshire. He has picked a quarrel with
+David Hume &amp; writes him letters of 14 pages Folio upbraiding
+him of all his <i>noirceurs</i>. Take one only as a
+specimen, he says, that at Calais they chanced to sleep
+in the same room together, &amp; that he overheard David
+talking in his sleep, and saying, <i>Ah! Je le tiens, ce Jean-Jacques
+l&agrave;.</i> In short (I fear) for want of persecution &amp;
+admiration (for these are real complaints) he will go back
+to the Continent.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What shall I say to you about the Ministry? I am as
+angry as a Common-council Man of London about my
+L<sup>d</sup> Chatham: but a little more patient, &amp; will hold my
+tongue till the end of the year. In the mean time I do
+mutter in secret &amp; to you, that to quit the house of Commons,
+his natural strength; to sap his own popularity &amp;
+grandeur (which no one but himself could have done) by
+assuming a foolish title; &amp; to hope that he could win by
+it and attach to him a Court, that hate him, &amp; will dismiss
+him, as soon as ever they dare, was the weakest thing,
+that ever was done by so great a Man. Had it not been
+for this, I should have rejoiced at the breach between him
+&amp; L<sup>d</sup> Temple, &amp; at the union between him &amp; the D: of
+Grafton &amp; M<sup>r</sup> Conway: but patience! we shall see! St:<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>
+perhaps is in the country (for he hoped for a month's
+leave of absence) and if you see him, you will learn more
+than I can tell you.</p>
+
+<p>Mason is at Aston. He is no longer so anxious about
+his wife's health, as he was, tho' I find she still has a
+cough, &amp; moreover I find she is not with child: but he
+made such a bragging, how could one choose but believe
+him.</p>
+
+<p>When I was in town, I mark'd in my pocket-book the
+utmost limits &amp; divisions of the two columns in your
+Thermometer, and asked Mr. Ayscough the Instrument-Maker
+on Ludgate Hill, what scales they were. He immediately
+assured me, that one was Fahrenheit's, &amp; shew'd
+me one exactly so divided. The other he took for Reaumur's,
+but, as he said there were different scales of his
+contrivance, he could not exactly tell, w<sup>ch</sup> of them it was.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+Your Brother told me, you wanted to know, who wrote
+Duke Wharton's life in the Biography: I think, it is
+chiefly borrowed from a silly book enough call'd <i>Memoirs
+of that Duke</i>: but who put it together there, no one can
+inform me. The only person certainly known to write in
+that vile collection (I mean these latter volumes) is D<sup>r</sup>
+Nicholls, who was expell'd here for stealing books.</p>
+
+<p>Have you read the <i>New Bath-Guide</i>?<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> it is the only
+thing in fashion, &amp; is a new &amp; original kind of humour.
+Miss Prue's Conversion I doubt you will paste down, as
+S<sup>r</sup> W: S<sup>t</sup> Quintyn did, before he carried it to his daughter.
+Yet I remember you all read <i>Crazy Tales</i><a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> without pasting.
+Buffon's first collection of Monkeys are come out (it makes
+the 14<sup>th</sup> volume) something, but not much, to my edification:
+for he is pretty well acquainted with their persons,
+but not with their manners.</p>
+
+<p>I shall be glad to hear, how far M<sup>rs</sup> Ettrick has succeeded,
+&amp; when you see an end to her troubles. my best
+respects to Mrs. Wharton, &amp; compliments to all your
+family: I will not name them, least I should affront any
+body. Adieu, dear S<sup>r</sup>,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>I am most sincerely yours,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>TG:</p>
+
+<p>August 26, 1766, Pembroke College.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brown is gone to see his Brother near Margate.
+When is L<sup>d</sup> Str:<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> to be married? If M<sup>r</sup> and M<sup>rs</sup> Jonathan
+are with you, I desire my compliments.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> "St." is Richard Stonhewer, a Fellow of Peterhouse, secretary
+to the Duke of Grafton, and a man of considerable, though not
+public, importance in politics.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> Anstey's&mdash;referred to in the Introduction.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> By Sterne's friend, John Hall Stevenson.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> Lord Strathmore.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span></p>
+<h2>HORACE WALPOLE (1717-1797)</h2>
+
+<h3>[AND W. M. THACKERAY].</h3>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>As much has been already said of Horace Walpole's
+letters, but practically nothing of his other works except
+his novel and his play, something more may be added
+here to show that he was not <i>merely</i> a "trifler." His
+private press at "Strawberry" was mainly a means of
+amusement to him, like a billiard-room or a tennis-court.
+But it provided some useful books&mdash;such as editions of
+Anthony Hamilton's <i>Memoirs of Grammont</i>, of Lord Herbert
+of Cherbury's <i>Life</i> and of part of Gray's <i>Poems</i>. He had
+neither historic knowledge nor historic sense enough to
+deal satisfactorily with such a subject as <i>Historic Doubts
+on Richard III.</i>, though the subject itself was quite worth
+dealing with. But his <i>Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors</i>,
+his <i>Anecdotes of Painting in England</i>, and his <i>Catalogue of
+Engravers</i> are not without value; and he could usefully
+handle the history of his own time, with proper corrections
+for his prejudices, etc. He was weakest of all as a literary
+critic: and his dealings with Chatterton were most unfortunate,
+though the mischief done was not intentional, and
+might not have been serious in any other case. These
+things have been said with a definite purpose&mdash;that of
+showing that Horace's interests, if seldom deep, were
+unusually wide. Now though width of interest is not, as
+Cowper's case shows, indispensable to goodness of letter-writing,
+it is a very great qualification for it, as giving to
+the result variety, colour, and "bite." At the same time,
+unless one had space on a very different scale from any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+possible here, it would be <i>im</i>possible to illustrate this
+"extensive curiosity" as they called it then: and Horace
+ought to be shown here in his <i>most</i> native element as a
+chronicler of "society." I have thought it worth while to
+subjoin for comparison Thackeray's wonderful <i>pastiche</i> in
+<i>The Virginians</i>, which is almost better Horace than Horace
+himself.<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>22. <span class="smcap">To the Countess of Ossory</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Arlington Street</span>,<br />
+April 31. 1773&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It is most true, madam, that I did purpose to regale
+myself with a visit to Ampthill; but this winter,
+which has trod hard upon last week's summer,
+blunted my intention for a while, though revivable in
+finer weather. Oh! but I had another reason for changing
+my mind; you are leaving Ampthill, and I do not
+mean only to write my name in your park-keeper's book.
+Yes, in spite of your ladyship's low spirited mood, you
+are coming from Ampthill, and you are to be at Strawberry
+Hill to-morrow se'nnight. You may not be in the
+secret, but Lord Ossory and I have settled it, and you
+are to be pawned to me while he is at Newmarket. He
+told me you certainly would if I asked it, and as they
+used to say in ancient writ, I do beg it upon the knees
+of my heart. Nay, it is unavoidable; for though a lady's
+word may be ever so crackable, you cannot have the
+conscience to break your husband's word, so I depend
+upon it. I have asked Mr. Craufurd to meet you, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+begged he would refuse me, that I might be sure of his
+coming. Mrs Meynel has taken another year's lease of
+her house, so you probably, madam, will not be tired of
+me for the livelong day for the whole time you shall
+honour my mansion. Your face will be well and your
+fever gone a week before to-morrow se'nnight, and you
+will look as well as ever you did in your life, that is, as
+you have done lately, which is better than ever you did
+before. You must not, in truth, expect that I your
+shepherd should be quite so fit to figure in a fan mount.
+Besides the gout for six months, which makes some flaws
+in the bloom of elderly Arcadians, I have been so far
+from keeping sheep for the last ten days, that I have
+kept nothing but bad hours; and have been such a rake
+that I put myself in mind of a poor old cripple that I saw
+formerly at Hogarth's auction: he bid for the Rake's
+Progress, saying, "I will buy my own progress," though
+he looked as if he had no more title to it than I have, but
+by limping and sitting up. In short, I have been at four
+balls since yesterday se'nnight, though I had the prudence
+not to stay supper at Lord Stanley's. That festival was
+very expensive, for it is the fashion now to make romances
+rather than balls. In the hall was a band of French horns
+and clarionets in laced uniforms and feathers. The dome
+of the staircase was beautifully illuminated with coloured
+glass lanthorns; in the ante-room was a bevy of vestals
+in white habits, making tea; in the next, a drapery of
+sarcenet, that with a very funereal air crossed the chimney,
+and depended in vast festoons over the sconces. The
+third chamber's doors were heightened with candles in
+gilt vases, and the ballroom was formed into an oval with
+benches above each other, not unlike pews, and covered
+with red serge, above which were arbours of flowers, red<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+and green pilasters, more sarcenet, and Lord March's
+glasses, which he had lent, as an upholsterer asked Lord
+Stanley 300l. for the loan of some. He had burst open
+the side of the wall to build an orchestra, with a pendant
+mirror to reflect the dancers, &agrave; la Guisnes; and the
+musicians were in scarlet robes, like the candle-snuffers
+who represent the senates of Venice at Drury Lane.
+There were two more chambers at which I never arrived
+for the crowd. The seasons, danced by himself, the
+younger Storer, the Duc de Lauzun and another, the
+youngest Miss Stanley, Miss Poole, the youngest Wrottesley
+and another Miss, who is likewise anonymous in my
+memory, were in errant shepherdly dresses without invention,
+and Storer and Miss Wrottesley in banians with
+furs, for winter, cock and hen. In six rooms below were
+magnificent suppers. I was not quite so sober last night
+at Mons. de Guisnes', where the evening began with a
+ball of children, from eighteen to four years old. They
+danced amazingly well, yet disappointed me, so many of
+them were ugly; but Dr. Delawarr's two eldest daughters
+and the Ancaster infanta performed a pas de trois as well
+as Mlle. Heinel, and the two eldest were pretty; yet
+I promise you, madam, the next age will be a thousand
+degrees below the present in beauty. The most interesting
+part was to observe the anxiety of the mothers while their
+children danced or supped; they supped at ten in three
+rooms. I should not omit telling you that the Vernons,
+especially the eldest, were not the homeliest part of the
+show. The former quadrilles then came again upon the
+stage, and Harry Conway the younger was so astonished
+at the agility of Mrs. Hobart's bulk, that he said he was
+sure she must be hollow. The tables were again spread
+in five rooms, and at past two in the morning we went to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+supper. To excuse <i>we</i>, I must plead that both the late
+and present chancellor, and the solemn Lord Lyttleton,
+my predecessors by some years, stayed as late as I did&mdash;and
+in good sooth the watchman went four as my chairman
+knocked at my door.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the result of good resolutions! I determined
+during my illness to have my colt's tooth drawn, and lo!
+I have cut four new in a week. Well! at least I am as
+grave as a judge, looked as rosy as Lord Lyttleton, and
+much soberer than my Lord Chancellor. To shew some
+marks of grace, I shall give up the opera, (indeed it is
+very bad) and go and retake my doctor's degrees among
+the dowagers at Lady Blandford's; and intending to
+have no more diversions than I have news to tell your
+ladyship, I think you shall not hear from me again till we
+meet, as I shall think it, in heaven.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>23. (<i>Thackeray imitating</i>). <span class="smcap">To the Hon. H. S. Conway</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Arlington Street</span>, Friday night.</p>
+
+<p>I have come away, child, for a day or two from my
+devotions to our Lady of Strawberry. Have I not
+been on my knees to her these three weeks, and
+aren't the poor old joints full of rheumatism? A fit took
+me that I would pay London a visit, that I would go to
+Vauxhall and Ranelagh. <i>Quoi!</i> May I not have my
+rattle as well as other elderly babies? Suppose, after
+being so long virtuous, I take a fancy to cakes and ale,
+shall your reverence say nay to me? George Selwyn and
+Tony Storer and your humble servant took boat at Westminster
+t'other night. Was it Tuesday?&mdash;no, Tuesday
+I was with their Graces of Norfolk, who are just from
+Tunbridge&mdash;it was Wednesday. How should I know?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Wasn't I dead drunk with a whole pint of lemonade I took
+at White's?</p>
+
+<p>The Norfolk folk had been entertaining me on Tuesday
+with the account of a young savage Iroquois, Choctaw,
+or Virginian, who has lately been making a little noise in
+our quarter of the globe. He is an offshoot of that disreputable
+family of Esmond-Castlewood, of whom all the
+men are gamblers and spendthrifts, and all the women&mdash;well,
+I shan't say the word, lest Lady Ailesbury should be
+looking over your shoulder. Both the late lords, my
+father told me, were in his pay, and the last one, a beau
+of Queen Anne's reign, from a viscount advanced to be
+an earl through the merits and intercession of his notorious
+old sister Bernstein, late Tusher, <i>nee</i> Esmond&mdash;a great
+beauty, too, of her day, a favourite of the old Pretender.
+She sold his secrets to my papa, who paid her for them;
+and being nowise particular in her love for the Stuarts,
+came over to the august Hanoverian house at present
+reigning over us. "Will Horace Walpole's tongue never
+stop scandal?" says your wife over your shoulder. I kiss
+your ladyship's hand. I am dumb. The Bernstein is a
+model of virtue. She had no good reasons for marrying
+her father's chaplain. Many of the nobility omit the
+marriage altogether. She <i>wasn't</i> ashamed of being Mrs.
+Tusher, and didn't take a German <i>Baroncino</i> for a second
+husband, whom nobody out of Hanover ever saw. The
+Yarmouth bears no malice. Esther and Vashti are very
+good friends, and have been cheating each other at Tunbridge
+at cards all the summer.</p>
+
+<p>"And what has all this to do with the Iroquois?" says
+your ladyship. The Iroquois has been at Tunbridge, too&mdash;not
+cheating, perhaps, but winning vastly. They say he
+has bled Lord March of thousands&mdash;Lord March, by whom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+so much blood hath been shed, that he has quarrelled
+with everybody, fought with everybody, rode over everybody,
+been fallen in love with by everybody's wife except
+Mr. Conway's, and <i>not</i> excepting her present Majesty, the
+Countess of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Queen
+of Walmoden and Yarmouth, whom heaven preserve to us.</p>
+
+<p>You know an offensive little creature <i>de par le monde</i>,
+one Jack Morris, who skips in and out of all the houses of
+London. When we were at Vauxhall, Mr. Jack gave us
+a nod under the shoulder of a pretty young fellow enough,
+on whose arm he was leaning, and who appeared hugely
+delighted with the enchantments of the garden. Lord,
+how he stared at the fireworks! Gods, how he huzzayed
+at the singing of a horrible painted wench who shrieked
+the ears off my head! A twopenny string of glass beads
+and a strip of tawdry cloth are treasures in Iroquois-land,
+and our savage valued them accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>A buzz went about the place that this was the fortunate
+youth. He won three hundred at White's last night very
+genteelly from Rockingham and my precious nephew, and
+here he was bellowing and huzzaying over the music so
+as to do you good to hear. I do not love a puppet-show,
+but I love to treat children to one, Miss Conway! I present
+your ladyship my compliments, and hope we shall go
+and see the dolls together.</p>
+
+<p>When the singing-woman came down from her throne,
+Jack Morris must introduce my Virginian to her. I saw him
+blush up to the eyes, and make her, upon my word, a very
+fine bow, such as I had no idea was practised in wigwams.
+"There is a certain <i>jenny squaw</i> about her, and that's
+why the savage likes her," George said&mdash;a joke certainly
+not as brilliant as a firework. After which it seemed to
+me that the savage and the savagess retired together.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Having had a great deal too much to eat and drink
+three hours before, my partners must have chicken and
+rack-punch at Vauxhall, where George fell asleep straightway,
+and for my sins I must tell Tony Storer what I knew
+about this Virginian's amiable family, especially some of
+the Bernstein's antecedents and the history of another
+elderly beauty of the family, a certain Lady Maria, who
+was <i>au mieux</i> with the late Prince of Wales. What did
+I say? I protest not half of what I knew, and of course
+not a tenth part of what I was going to tell, for who
+should start out upon us but my savage, this time quite
+red in the face; and in his <i>war paint</i>. The wretch had
+been drinking fire-water in the next box!</p>
+
+<p>He cocked his hat, clapped his hand to his sword, asked
+which of the gentlemen was it that was maligning his
+family? so that I was obliged to entreat him not to make
+such a noise, lest he should wake my friend Mr. George
+Selwyn. And I added, "I assure you, sir, I had no idea
+that you were near me, and I most sincerely apologize for
+giving you pain."</p>
+
+<p>The Huron took his hand off his tomahawk at this
+pacific rejoinder, made a bow not ungraciously, said he
+could not, of course, ask more than an apology from a
+gentleman of my age (<i>Merci, Monsieur!</i>) and, hearing
+the name of Mr. Selwyn, made another bow to George,
+and said he had a letter to him from Lord March, which
+he had had the ill-fortune to mislay. George has put
+him up for the club, it appears, in conjunction with March,
+and no doubt these three lambs will fleece each other.
+Meanwhile, my pacified savage sat down with us, and
+<i>buried the hatchet</i> in another bowl of punch, for which
+these gentlemen must call. Heaven help us! 'Tis eleven
+o'clock, and here comes Bedson with my gruel!</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>H. W.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> There is an amicable dispute among Thackerayans whether
+this or the imitation-<i>Spectator</i> paper in <i>Esmond</i> is the more
+wonderful of their joint kind. To facilitate this comparison the
+letter part (for there is one) of that paper will be given here under
+Thackeray's own name.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+<h2>TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT (1721-1771)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Smollett's reputation has been of course always mainly,
+indeed almost wholly, that of a novelist, though his miscellaneous
+work is of no small merit. But that he wrote his
+best novel <i>in</i> letters and that perhaps it is one of the best
+so written, has been mentioned. His <i>Travels</i> are also of
+the letter-kind&mdash;especially of the ill-tempered-letter-kind.
+Of his actual correspondence we have not much. But the
+following has always seemed to the present writer an
+admirable and agreeably characteristic example. Smollett's
+outwardly surly but inwardly kindly temper, and his
+command of phrase ("great Cham of literature" has, as
+we say now, "stuck") both appear in it: and the matter
+is interesting. We have, so far as I remember, no record
+of any interview between Johnson and Smollett, though
+they must have met. They were both Tories, and Johnson
+wrote in the <i>Critical Review</i> which Smollett edited. But
+Johnson's gibes at Scotland are not likely to have conciliated
+Smollett: and there was just that combination of likeness
+and difference between the two men which (especially as
+the one was as typically English as the other was Scotch)
+generates incompatibility. How victoriously Wilkes got
+over Johnson's personal dislike to him all readers of Boswell
+know: and it is one of the most amusing passages in the
+book. On this occasion, too, he did what was asked of him.
+"Frank" had not been <i>pressed</i>, but had joined for some
+reason of his own. However, he accepted his discharge
+and returned to his master, staying till that master's
+death.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>24. <span class="smcap">To John Wilkes, Esq.</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Chelsea</span>, 16th March, 1759.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Sir</p>
+
+<p>I am again your petitioner, in behalf of that
+great <span class="smcap">Cham</span> of literature, Samuel Johnson. His
+black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has been
+pressed on board the Stag frigate, Captain Angel, and our
+lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a
+sickly lad, of a delicate frame, and particularly subject to
+a malady in his throat, which renders him very unfit for
+His Majesty's service. You know what matter of animosity
+the said Johnson has against you: and I dare say
+you desire no other opportunity of resenting it, than that
+of laying him under an obligation. He was humble enough
+to desire my assistance on this occasion, though he and
+I were never cater-cousins; and I gave him to understand
+that I would make application to my friend Mr. Wilkes,
+who, perhaps, by his interest with Dr. Hay and Mr. Elliot,
+might be able to procure the discharge of his lacquey. It
+would be superfluous to say more on this subject, which
+I leave to your own consideration; but I cannot let slip
+this opportunity of declaring that I am, with the most
+inviolable esteem and attachment, dear Sir, your affectionate,
+obliged, humble servant,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">T. Smollett.</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It was necessary to say a good deal about Cowper's
+letters in the Introduction, but it would hardly do to stint
+him of some further comment. It will be a most unfortunate
+evidence of degradation in English literary taste
+if he ever loses the position there assigned to him, and
+practically acknowledged by all the best judges for the last
+century. For there is certainly no other epistoler who has
+displayed such consummate (if also such unconscious) art
+in making the most out of the least. Of course people
+who must have noise, and bustle, and "importance" of
+matter, and so forth, may be dissatisfied. But their dissatisfaction
+convicts not Cowper but themselves: and the
+conviction is not for want of Art, but for want of appreciation
+of Art. Now this last is one of the most terrible
+faults to be found in any human creature. Not everybody
+can be an artist: but everybody who is not deficient to
+this or that extent in sense&mdash;to use that word in its widest
+and best interpretation, for understanding and feeling
+both&mdash;can enjoy an artist's work. Nor is there any more
+important function of the often misused word "education"
+than "bringing out" this sense when it is dormant, and
+training and developing it when it is brought out. And
+few things are more useful for exercise in this way than the
+under-current of artistry in Cowper's "chit-chat." His
+letters are so familiar that it is vain to aim at any great
+originality in selecting them. The following strikes me as
+an excellent example. What more trite than references to
+increased expense of postage (rather notably topical just
+now though!) and remarks on a greenhouse? And what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+less trite&mdash;except to tritical tastes and intellects&mdash;than this
+letter?</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>25. <span class="smcap">To the Rev. John Newton</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Sept. 18. 1784.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Friend,</p>
+
+<p>Following your good example, I lay before
+me a sheet of my largest paper. It was this
+moment fair and unblemished but I have begun to blot it,
+and having begun, am not likely to cease till I have spoiled
+it. I have sent you many a sheet that in my judgment
+of it has been very unworthy of your acceptance, but my
+conscience was in some measure satisfied by reflecting,
+that if it were good for nothing, at the same time it cost
+you nothing, except the trouble of reading it. But the
+case is altered now. You must pay a solid price for
+frothy matter, and though I do not absolutely pick your
+pocket, yet you lose your money, and, as the saying is,
+are never the wiser; a saying literally fulfilled to the
+reader of my epistles.</p>
+
+<p>My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just
+upon the point of being turned out of it. The gentleness
+of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter
+season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we
+ever find it in summer; when, the winds being generally
+brisk, we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity
+of air, without being at the same time incommoded by it.
+But now I sit with all the windows and the door wide
+open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower in a
+garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it.
+We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I should hardly
+hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood
+resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum,
+which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my
+ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that
+nature utters are delightful,&mdash;at least in this country.
+I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa,
+or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast
+in England whose voice I do not account musical, save
+and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of
+all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception.
+I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage,
+that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of
+his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard,
+is no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black
+beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my
+way, I have no objection to any of the rest; on the
+contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's fine
+treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all.
+Seriously however it strikes me as a very observable
+instance of providential kindness to man, that such an
+exact accord has been contrived between his ear, and the
+sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is
+almost every moment visited. All the world is sensible
+of the uncomfortable effect that certain sounds have upon
+the nerves, and consequently upon the spirits:&mdash;and if a
+sinful world had been filled with such as would have
+curdled the blood, and have made the sense of hearing
+a perpetual inconvenience, I do not know that we should
+have had a right to complain. But now the fields, the
+woods, the gardens have each their concert, and the ear
+of man is for ever regaled by creatures who seem only to
+please themselves. Even the ears that are deaf to the
+Gospel, are continually entertained, though without knowing
+it, by sounds for which they are solely indebted to its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+author. There is somewhere in infinite space a world that
+does not roll within the precincts of mercy, and as it is
+reasonable, and even scriptural, to suppose that there is
+music in Heaven, in those dismal regions perhaps the
+reverse of it is found; tones so dismal, as to make woe
+itself more insupportable, and to acuminate<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> even despair.
+But my paper admonishes me in good time to draw the
+reins, and to check the descent of my fancy into deeps,
+with which she is but too familiar.</p>
+
+<p>Our best love attends you both, with yours,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'><i>Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus</i>,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>W. C.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> "Acuminate" = "sharpen," is a perfectly good word in itself,
+but perhaps does not so perfectly suit "despair," which crushes
+rather than pierces.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It has been said of Sydney Smith that he was not only a
+humourist, but a "good-humourist," and this is undoubtedly
+true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual
+custom, sometimes rather acidulated his good humour;
+but anybody possessed of the noun, with the least allowance
+of the adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which
+the almost Radical reformer of <i>Peter Plymley's Letters</i> in
+1807 became the almost Tory and wholly conservative
+maintainer of ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon
+Singleton thirty years later.</p>
+
+<p>Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated
+kind: but we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence,
+also agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing.
+Whether Sydney (his friends always abbreviated him thus,
+and he accepted the Christian name) describes the makeshifts
+of his Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset
+one; whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums
+on pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given
+him a whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time"&mdash;he
+is always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do
+not go to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive
+sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves
+as does that of some&mdash;perhaps most&mdash;professional jokers:
+neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it
+bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for
+they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in
+still shorter <i>flashes</i> such as those glanced at above; as the
+grave proposition that "the information of very plain
+women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short newspaper
+paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard
+work with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous
+this season and in great force, from the irregular supply of
+rain." But the following specimens are fairly representative.
+They were written at an interval of about ten
+years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe
+Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who
+began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming
+Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady
+Rachel," the famous wife of the person who suffered for the
+Rye House plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady
+Russell, but Miss Berry had written a <i>Life</i> of her under her
+maiden name). Sydney's politics show in his allusion to
+the assassination of the Duc de Berri, son of Charles X. of
+France (who had, however, not then come to the throne);
+in his infinitely greater sorrow for the dismissal of the mildly
+Liberal minister Decazes; and in his spleen at the supporters
+of the English Tory government of Lord Liverpool. (The
+"little plot" was Thistlewood's). In the second letter the
+"hotel" is his new parsonage in Somerset: "Bowood,"
+Lord Lansdowne's Wiltshire house, a great Whig rallying
+place. I suppose "Sea-shore Calcott" is Sir A. W. Calcott
+the painter. "Luttrell" (Henry), a talker and versifier
+very well known in his own day, but of less enduring
+reputation than some others. "Napier's Book," the
+brilliant if somewhat partisan <i>History of the Peninsular War</i>.
+I am not quite certain in which of two senses Sydney uses
+the word <i>caract&egrave;re</i>. As ought to be well known this does
+not exactly correspond to our "character"&mdash;but most
+commonly means "temper" or "disposition." It has,
+however, a peculiar technical meaning of "official description"
+or "estimate" which would suit Sir William
+Napier well. The Napiers were "kittle cattle" from the
+official point of view.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>26. <span class="smcap">To Miss Berry</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Foston</span>, Feb 27th, 1820.</p>
+
+<p>I thank you very much for the entertainment I have
+received from your book. I should however have
+been afraid to marry such a woman as Lady Rachel;
+it would have been too awful. There are pieces of china
+very fine and beautiful, but never intended for daily
+use....</p>
+
+<p>I have hardly slept out of Foston since I saw you. God
+send I may be still an animal, and not a vegetable! but
+I am a little uneasy at this season for sprouting and rural
+increase, for I fear I should have undergone the metamorphose
+so common in country livings. I shall go to
+town about the end of March; it will be completely empty,
+and the drugs that remain will be entirely occupied about
+hustings and returning-officers.</p>
+
+<p>Commerce and manufacturers are still in a frightful state
+of stagnation.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No foreign barks in British ports are seen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stuff'd to the water's edge with velveteen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or bursting with big bales of bombazine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No distant climes demand our corduroy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unmatch'd habiliment for man and boy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No fleets of fustian quit the British shore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cloth-creating engines cease to roar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still is that loom which breech'd the world before.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I am very sorry for the little fat Duke de Berri, but
+infinitely more so for the dismissal of De Cases,&mdash;a fatal
+measure.</p>
+
+<p>I must not die without seeing Paris. Figure to yourself
+what a horrid death,&mdash;to die without seeing Paris!
+I think I could make something of this in a tragedy, so as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+to draw tears from Donna Agnes and yourself. Where
+are you going to? When do you return? Why do you
+go at all? Is Paris more agreeable than London?</p>
+
+<p>We have had a little plot here in a hay-loft. God forbid
+anybody should be murdered! but, if I were to turn
+assassin, it should not be of five or six Ministers, who are<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">placed where they are by the folly of the country gentlemen,</span><br />
+but of the hundred thousand squires, to whose
+stupidity and folly such an Administration owes its
+existence.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Ever your friend,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Sydney Smith</span>.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>27. <span class="smcap">To N. Fazakerly, Esq.</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Combe Florey</span>, October, 1829.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Fazakerly,</p>
+
+<p>I don't know anybody who would be less
+affronted at being called hare-brained than our
+friend who has so tardily conveyed my message, and I am
+afraid now he has only given you a part of it. The
+omission appears to be, that I had set up an hotel on the
+Western road, that it would be opened next spring, and
+I hoped for the favour of yours and Mrs. Fazakerly's
+patronage. "Well-aired beds, neat wines, careful drivers,
+etc. etc."</p>
+
+<p>I shall have very great pleasure in coming to see you,
+and I quite agree in the wisdom of postponing that event
+till the rural Palladios and Vitruvii are chased away;
+I have fourteen of them here every day. The country is
+perfectly beautiful, and my parsonage the prettiest place
+in it.</p>
+
+<p>I was at Bowood last week: the only persons there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+were seashore Calcott and his wife,&mdash;two very sensible,
+agreeable people. Luttrell came over for the day; he
+was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of
+veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter
+with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not
+steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures
+with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by
+some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better
+opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not
+only of what he is consuming at the moment, but of the
+soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course
+of dining, and which have gradually and justly elevated
+the species. I am perhaps making too much of this; but
+the failures of a man of sense are always painful.</p>
+
+<p>I quite agree about Napier's book. I do<a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> not think that
+any<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> man would venture to write so true, bold, and honest
+a book; it gave me a high idea of his understanding, and
+makes me very anxious about his <i>caract&egrave;re</i></p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Ever yours,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Sydney Smith</span>.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> One would expect either "did" or "other": but the actual
+combination is a very likely slip of pen or press.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Since this little book was undertaken it has been
+announced, truly or not, that the bulk of Scott's autograph
+letters has been bought by a fortunate and wise man of
+letters for the sum of &pound;1500. Neither life nor literature
+can ever be expressed in money value: but if one had &pound;1500
+to spend on something not directly necessary, it is possible
+to imagine a very large number of less satisfactory purchases.
+For as was briefly suggested in the Introduction, Scott's
+letters&mdash;while saturated with that singular humanity and
+nobility of character in which he has hardly a rival among
+authors of whom we know much&mdash;are distinctly remarkable
+from the purely literary point of view. His published
+work, both in verse and prose, has been accused (with what
+amount of justice we will not here trouble ourselves to
+discuss)&mdash;of carelessness in style and art. No such charge
+could possibly be brought against his letters, which hit the
+happy mean between slovenliness and artificial elaboration
+in a fashion that could hardly be bettered. The great
+variety of his correspondents, too, provides an additional
+attraction: for letters indited to the same person are apt
+to show a certain monotony. And Scott is equal to any
+and every occasion. Here as elsewhere the "Diary"
+drains off a certain proportion of matter: but chiefly for
+the latest period and in circumstances scarcely happy
+enough for letters themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The following letter was selected because of its admirable
+treatment of a theme&mdash;the behaviour, responsibility, and
+general <i>status</i> of Authors as objects of public judgment&mdash;on
+which an infinite amount of deplorable and disgusting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+nonsense has been talked and written. It starts, as will
+be seen, with the quarrel between Lord and Lady Byron&mdash;and
+then generalises. Not many things show Scott's
+golden equity and fairness better. He is perhaps "a little
+kind" to Campbell, who was, one fears, an extra-irritable
+specimen of the irritable race: but this is venial. And
+probably he did not mean the stigma which might be
+inferred from the conjunction of "Aphra <i>and</i> Orinda."
+They were certainly both of Charles II.'s time: but while
+poor Aphra was, if not wholly vicious, far from virtuous,
+the "matchless Orinda" (Katherine Philips) bears no
+stain on her character.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>28. <span class="smcap">To Joanna Baillie</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>(End of April 1816)</p>
+
+<p>My dear friend,</p>
+
+<p>I am glad you are satisfied with my reasons
+for declining a direct interference with Lord
+B[yron]. I have not, however, been quite idle, and as an
+old seaman have tried to go by a side wind when I had
+not the means of going before it, and this will be so far
+plain to you when I say that I have every reason to
+believe the good intelligence is true that a separation is
+signed between Lord and Lady Byron. If I am not as
+angry as you have good reason to expect every thinking
+and feeling man to be, it is from deep sorrow and regret
+that a man possessed of such noble talents should so
+utterly and irretrievably lose himself. In short, I believe
+the thing to be as you state it, and therefore Lord Byron
+is the object of anything rather than indignation. It is
+a cruel pity that such high talents should have been joined
+to a mind so wayward and incapable of seeking control
+where alone it is to be found, in the quiet discharge of
+domestic duties and filling up in peace and affection his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>
+station in society. The idea of his ultimately resisting
+that which should be fair and honourable to Lady B. did
+not come within my view of his character&mdash;at least of his
+natural character; but I hear that, as you intimated, he
+has had execrable advisers. I hardly know a more painful
+object of consideration than a man of genius in such a
+situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation,
+and become like pigs, familiarised with the filthy
+elements in which they grovel; but it is impossible that
+a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often feel the
+want of that which he has forfeited&mdash;the fair esteem of
+those by whom genius most naturally desires to be admired
+and cherished.</p>
+
+<p>I am much obliged to Mrs. Baillie for excluding me in
+her general censure of authors; but I should have hoped
+for a more general spirit of toleration from my good friend,
+who had in her own family and under her own eye such an
+exception to her general censure&mdash;unless, indeed (which
+may not be far from the truth), she supposes that female
+genius is more gentle and tractable, though as high in tone
+and spirit as that of the masculine sex. But the truth
+is, I believe, we will find a great equality when the different
+habits of the sexes and the temptations they are
+exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early
+flattered and coaxed, and told they are fitted for the
+higher regions of genius and unfit for anything else,&mdash;that
+they are a superior kind of automaton and ought to move
+by different impulses than others,&mdash;indulge their friends
+and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that
+worthy knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And
+then, if our man of genius escapes this temptation, how
+is he to parry the opposition of the blockheads who join
+all their hard heads and horns together to butt him out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+of the ordinary pasture, goad him back to Parnassus, and
+"bid him on the barren mountain starve." It is amazing
+how far this goes, if a man will let it go, in turning him
+out of the ordinary course of life into the stream of odd
+bodies, so that authors come to be regarded as tumblers,
+who are expected to go to church in a summerset, because
+they sometimes throw a Catherine-wheel for the amusement
+of the public. A man even told me at an election,
+thinking I believe he was saying a severe thing, that I was
+a poet, and therefore that the subject we were discussing
+lay out of my way. I answered as quietly as I could,
+that I did not apprehend my having written poetry
+rendered me incapable of speaking common sense in prose,
+and that I requested the audience to judge of me not by
+the nonsense I might have written for their amusement,
+but by the sober sense I was endeavouring to speak for
+their information, and only expected [of] them, in case
+I had ever happened to give any of them pleasure, in a
+way which was supposed to require some information and
+talent, [that] they would not, for that sole reason, suppose
+me incapable of understanding or explaining a point of the
+profession for which I had been educated. So I got a
+patient and very favourable hearing. But certainly these
+great exertions of friends and enemies have forced many a
+poor fellow out of the common paths of life, and obliged
+him to make a trade of what can only be gracefully
+executed as an occasional avocation. When such a man
+is encouraged in all his freaks and follies, the bit is taken
+out of his mouth, and, as he is turned out upon the
+common, he is very apt to deem himself exempt from
+all the rules incumbent on those who keep the king's
+highway. And so they play fantastic tricks before high
+heaven.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The lady authors are not exempt from these vagaries,
+being exposed to the same temptations; and all I can
+allow Mrs. Baillie in favour of the fair sex is that since
+the time of the Aphras and Orindas of Charles II's time,
+the authoresses have been ridiculous only, while the
+authors have too often been both absurd and vicious.
+As to our leal friend Tom Campbell, I have heard stories
+of his morbid sensibility chiefly from the Minto family,
+with whom he lived for some time, and I think they all
+turned on little foolish points of capricious affectation,
+which perhaps had no better foundation than an ill-imagined
+mode of exhibiting his independence. But
+whatever I saw of him myself&mdash;and we were often together,
+and sometimes for several days&mdash;was quite composed
+and manly. Indeed, I never worried him to make
+him get on his hind legs and spout poetry when he did
+not like it. He deserves independence well; and if the
+dog which now awakens him to the recollection of his
+possessing it, happened formerly to disturb the short
+sleep that drowned his recollection of so great a blessing,
+there is good reason for enduring the disturbance with
+more patience than before.</p>
+
+<p>But surely, admitting all our temptations and irregularities
+there are men of genius enough living to restrain
+the mere possession of talent from the charge of disqualifying
+the owner for the ordinary occupation and duties
+of life. There never were better men, and especially
+better husbands, fathers, and real patriots, than Southey
+and Wordsworth; they might even be pitched upon as
+most exemplary characters. I myself, if I may rank
+myself in the list, am, as Hamlet says, indifferent honest,
+and at least not worse than an infidel in loving those of
+my own house. And I think that generally speaking,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+authors, like actors, being rather less commonly believed
+to be eccentric than was the faith fifty years since, do
+conduct themselves as amenable to the ordinary rules of
+society.</p>
+
+<p>This tirade was begun a long time since, but is destined
+to be finished at Abbotsford. Your bower is all planted
+with its evergreens, but must for seven years retain its
+original aspect of a gravel pit.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>(Rest lost.)</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is a strange thing, and could hardly have happened in
+any country but England, that there is to this day no
+complete collection or edition of the works of Coleridge&mdash;one
+of the most poetical of our poets, one of the most
+important of our critics, and one of the most influential,
+if one of the least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers.
+Indeed we never knew what good prose he could
+write till the fragments called <i>Anima Poetae</i> were published,
+two-thirds of a century after his death. But that no
+collected edition of his letters appeared till very shortly
+before this is explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's
+temperament was not heroic, and his correspondence as
+well as his conduct justified, in regard to much more than
+his nonage, the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist
+that he must have been "a very <i>beatable</i> child."
+To a certain extent, however, the correspondence does also
+justify our adoption (see <i>Introduction</i>) of the charitable
+theory that enlargement of understanding brings about
+extension of pardon. And putting this aside, the letters
+sometimes give us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous
+conversation (or rather monologue) must have been like.
+They are not very easy to select from, for their author's
+singular tendency to <i>divagation</i> affects them. But they
+sometimes display that humour which he undoubtedly
+possessed, though his best-known published writings
+seldom admit of it: and the divagation itself has its advantages.
+In the following Coleridge appears in curiously
+different lights. After joking at his own Pantheism he
+becomes amazingly practical, for it <i>was</i>, as Scott points<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
+out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to cling to the system
+of "half-profits," a fault which often made his enormous
+labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise to I-set" =
+"getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a favourite
+quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the <i>Morning Post</i> for
+which Coleridge was then writing. "The Anthology"&mdash;an
+<i>Annual</i> one edited by Southey. As for the <i>Anti-Jacobin</i>
+libel it was, admirable as was the wit that accompanied it,
+utterly indefensible; for it accused Coleridge of having
+<i>at this time</i> "left his poor children fatherless and his wife
+destitute" (the extraordinary thing is that he actually
+did this later!) Of course he never executed the Life of
+Lessing.<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> "The Wedgwoods" had given him an annuity.
+The assault on "Mr. Go<i>b</i>win" is one of poor Hartley
+Coleridge's most delightful feats. Had he been a little
+older, he might have pointed out to the author of <i>Political
+Justice</i> that lecturing his mother for his, Hartley's, fault
+was quite unjustifiable: and indeed that objecting to it at
+all was improper. The right way (according to that great
+work itself) would have been to discuss with Hartley
+whether the advantage in physical exercise and animal
+spirits derived by him from wielding the nine-pin, outweighed
+the pain experienced by Go<i>b</i>win, and so was justifiable
+on the total scheme of things. ("Moshes," as indeed
+is obvious, was Hartley's pet-name).</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>29. <span class="smcap">To Robert Southey</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+Tuesday night, 12 o'clock<br />
+(December 24) 1799.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>My dear Southey,</p>
+
+<p>My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith
+'tis very like it) disposed me to consider this
+big city as that part of the supreme One which the prophet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+Moses was allowed to see&mdash;I should be more disposed to
+pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a <i>Bush</i>, than while I
+am forcing my reason to believe that even in theatres <i>He</i>
+is, yea! even in the Opera House. Your "Thalaba" will
+beyond all doubt bring you two hundred pounds, if you
+will sell it at once; but <i>do</i> not print at a venture, under
+the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that
+Longman regretted the bargain he made with Cottle
+concerning the second edition of the "Joan of Arc," and
+is indisposed to similar negotiations; but most and very
+eager to have the property of your works at almost any
+price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you
+may hear it from me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle's
+affairs in London. The whole and total copyright of your
+"Joan," and the first volume of your poems (exclusive of
+what Longman had before given), was taken by him at
+three hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong
+swimmer, and have borne up poor Joey with all his leaden
+weights about him, his own and other people's! Nothing
+has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost
+somewhat&mdash;by Fox, Amos, and himself <i>very much</i>. I can
+sell your "Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in
+your presence. I am employed from I-rise to I-set (that
+is, from nine in the morning to twelve at night), a pure
+scribbler. My mornings to booksellers' compilations,
+after dinner to Stuart, who pays <i>all</i> my expenses here, let
+them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go
+to make up an hundred and fifty pounds for my year's
+expenditure; for, supposing <i>all clear</i>, my year's (1800)
+allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by the first of
+April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write
+often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay
+on the new French Constitution, Advice to Friends of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+Freedom, Critiques on Sir W. Anderson's Nose, Odes to
+Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted), Christmas
+Carols, etc., etc.&mdash;anything not bad in the paper, that is
+not yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as
+worthy the "Anthology," "do me the honour, sir!"
+However, in the course of a week I <i>do mean</i> to conduct a
+series of essays in that paper which may be of public
+utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out
+of London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance,
+and, in as strict a sense as is <i>possible</i>, an
+Impromptu, and, had I done all I had planned, that
+"Ode to the Duchess" would have been a better thing
+than it is&mdash;it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought
+the "Beauties of the Anti-jacobin," and attorneys and
+counsellors advise me to prosecute, and offer to undertake
+it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or expense. They
+say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about
+the "Fears in Solitude." If he gives them up they are
+yours. That dull ode has been printed often enough, and
+may now be allowed to "sink with deep swoop, and to
+the bottom <i>go</i>," to quote an admired author; but the
+two others will do with a little trimming.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that
+which most oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving
+London I fall to the "Life of Lessing"; till that is done,
+till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof that I am
+<i>endeavouring</i> to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot
+stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see
+no impossibility of forming a pleasant little colony for a
+few years in Italy or the South of France. Peace will
+come soon. God love you, my dear Southey! <i>I</i> would
+write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You
+should do nothing that did not absolutely <i>please</i> you. Be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+idle, be very idle! The habits of your mind are such that
+you will necessarily do much; but be as idle as you can.</p>
+
+<p>Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that
+we have received our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and
+my talkativeness is his, without diminution on my side.
+'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the blood,
+beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's
+and met Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix
+dullity and nullity, young Towers, who desired to be
+remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine at
+Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the
+philosopher such a rap on the shins with a ninepin that
+Gobwin in huge pain <i>lectured</i> Sara on his boisterousness.
+I was not at home. <i>Est modus in rebus.</i> Moshes is somewhat
+too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of
+Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and,
+thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the
+day Davy and I dined there.</p>
+
+<p>God love you and</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">S. T. Coleridge.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list
+of the books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the
+catalogue of a most interesting library in Utopia.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One of the strangest things met by the present writer
+in the course of preparing this book was a remark of the
+late Mr. Scoones&mdash;an old acquaintance and a man who has
+deserved most excellently on the subject&mdash;in reference to
+Southey's letters, that they show the author as "dry and
+unsympathetic." "They contain too much information
+to be good as letters." Well: there certainly is information
+in the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not
+readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite
+occasional touches of self-righteousness and of over-bookishness,
+was full of humour, extraordinarily affectionate,
+and extremely natural. There is moreover a great deal
+of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge: for "lingos"
+of the kind, though in her case they may have helped to
+disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were in her
+time and afterwards by no means uncommon, especially&mdash;physiologists
+must say why&mdash;with the female sex. The
+present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth century,
+knew a lady of family, position and property who was fond
+of the phrase, "hail-fellow-well-met," but always turned
+it into "Fellowship Wilmot"&mdash;a pretty close parallel to
+"horsemangander" for "horse-godmother". Extension&mdash;with
+levelling&mdash;of education, and such processes as those
+which have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and
+"Kirton" into "Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon
+rarer: but have also made such a <i>locus classicus</i> of the
+habit as this all the more valuable and amusing. It may
+be added that Lamb, in one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured
+glance at this peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge
+in reference to the aptitude of the younger in her "<i>mother</i>-tongue."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+Southey has dealt with the matter in several
+epistles to his friend Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would
+have been rather long but the following mosaic will, I think,
+do very well. Dr. Warter, the editor of the supplementary
+collection of Southey's letters from which it comes, was
+the husband of Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a
+little literature, sometimes<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a> in connection, not merely as
+here with Sara Coleridge the younger, but with Dora
+Wordsworth&mdash;the three daughters of the three Lake Poets.
+She was, as her father says, a very tall girl, while her aunt,
+Mrs. Coleridge, was little (her husband, writing from Hamburg,
+speaks with surprise of some German lady as "smaller
+than you are").</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>30. <span class="smcap">To Grosvenor C. Bedford Esq</span>:</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Keswick</span>, Sep. 14, 1821</p>
+
+<p>Dear Stumparumper,</p>
+
+<p>Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford,
+as if you were slopy. The purport of this
+letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes in
+Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an
+imperfect one) of the language spoken in this house by ...
+and invented by her. I have carefully composed a
+vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and mine,
+having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying
+in full confabulumpatus.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>31. <span class="smcap">To Grosvenor C. Bedford Esq</span>:</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Keswick</span>, Oct. 7, 1821.</p>
+
+<p>My dear G,</p>
+
+<p>I very much approve your laudable
+curiosity to know the precise meaning of that
+noble word <i>horsemangandering</i>. Before I tell you its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+application, you must be informed of its history and
+origin. Be it therefore known unto you that ... the
+whole and sole inventor of the never-to-be-forgotten <i>lingo
+grande</i> (in which, by the bye, I purpose ere long to compose
+a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my
+daughter a great <i>horsemangander</i>, thinking, I suppose, that
+that appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning
+as could be put into any decent compound. From this
+substantive the verb has been formed to denote an operation
+performed by the said daughter upon the said aunt,
+of which I was an astonished spectator. The horsemangander&mdash;that
+is to say, Edith May&mdash;being tall and strong,
+came behind the person to be horsemangandered (to wit,
+...), and took her round the waist, under the arms, then
+jumped with her all the way from the kitchen into the
+middle of the parlour; the motion of the horsemangandered
+person at every jump being something like that
+of a paviour's rammer, and all resistance impossible.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>32. <span class="smcap">To Grosvenor C. Bedford Esq</span>:</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Keswick</span>, Oct. 8, 1821.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</p>
+
+<p>P.S. The name of the newly-discovered language (of
+which I have more to say hereafter) is the <i>lingo grande</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>33. <span class="smcap">To Grosvenor C. Bedford Esq</span>:</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Keswick</span>, Dec. 24, 1822</p>
+
+<p>Dear Stumparumper,</p>
+
+<p>So long a time has elapsed since I sent you
+the commencement of my remarks upon the
+peculiar language spoken by ... which I have denominated
+the <span class="smcap">lingo-grande</span>, that I fear you may suppose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+that I have altogether neglected the subject. Yet such
+a subject, as you must perceive, requires a great deal of
+patient observation, as well as of attentive consideration;
+and were I to flustercumhurry over it, as if it were a matter
+which could be undercumstood in a jiffump (that is to say
+in a momper), this would be to do what I have undertaken
+shabroonily, and you might shartainly have reason to
+think me fuffling and indiscruckt. Upon my vurtz I have
+not dumdawdled with it, like a dangleampeter; which
+being interpreted in the same <i>lingo</i> is an undecider, or an
+improvidentur, too idle to explore the hurtch mine which
+he has had the fortune to discover. No, I must be a
+stupossum indeed to act thus, as well as a slouwdowdekcum,
+or slowdonothinger; and these are appellations
+which she has never bestowed upon me; though, perhaps,
+the uncommon richness, and even exuberance of her
+language has not been more strikingly displayed in anything
+than in the variety of names which it has enabled
+her to shower upon my devoted person.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</p>
+
+<p>
+And so-o-o,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Dear Miscumter Bedfordiddlededford,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 8em;">I subcumscribe myself,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Your sincumcere friendiddledend and serdiddledeservant,</span></p>
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Robcumbert Southey diddiedouthey</span>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Student in the Lingo-Grande, Graduate in Butlerology,
+Professor of the science of Noncumsensediddledense, of
+sneezing and of vocal music, P.L. and LL.D. etc etc.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> See Wordsworth's <i>Triad</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There are not many people about whom it is more difficult&mdash;or
+more unnecessary&mdash;to write than it is about Lamb. A
+few very unfortunate people do not enjoy him, and probably
+never could be made to do so. Most of those who care for
+literature at all revel in him: and do not in the least need
+to be told to do so. And, as was said before, there is hardly
+any difference between his published works and his letters
+except that the former stand a little&mdash;a very little&mdash;more
+"upon ceremony." As to selecting the letters one remembers
+Mr. Matthew Arnold's very agreeable confession, when he
+was asked to select his poems, that he wanted to select them
+all. This being impossible, one has to confess that, putting
+subject, scale etc. aside, any one is almost as tempting as
+any other, and that whatever is chosen reminds one, half-regretfully,
+of the letters that were left. When a man can
+write (to William Wordsworth too), "The very head and
+sum of the girlery were two young girls," there is nothing left
+to do but to repeat, with the slight alteration of "write to"
+for "ask," Thackeray's ejaculation to the supposed host
+at an unusually satisfactory dinner, "Dear Sir! do <i>ask</i>
+us again." And on almost every page of his letters, whether
+in Talfourd's original issue of them or in the more recent
+and fuller editions of his works, the spirit is the same everywhere:
+the volume only differs. If (but you never know
+exactly when Lamb is speaking seriously) at the time he
+had "an aversion from letter writing," then most certainly
+Mrs. Malaprop was justified in saying that there "is nothing
+like beginning with a little aversion"! The letter which
+follows is, though it may have pleased others besides myself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+not one of the stock examples. But it seems to me to
+present a rather unusual combination of Lamb's attractive
+qualities, not a little of his rare phrase ("divine plain face"
+especially) and a remarkable expression of that yearning
+for <i>solitude</i> which some people seem to think rather shameful,
+but which to others is a thing no more to be accounted for
+than it is to be got rid of. It will be observed that the
+letter, ostensibly to Mrs. W., is really both to her and to
+her husband. "W. H." is of course Hazlitt, and the
+"lectures" are his famous ones on English Poets. As for
+Lamb's criticisms on lectures generally, they would perhaps
+be endorsed by some who have given, as well as by many
+who have received, this form of instruction. The "gentleman
+at Haydon's" was the hero or victim of a story good,
+but too long to give here. He said some excessively
+foolish things and Lamb, after dinner, behaved to him in a
+fashion possibly not quite undeserved but entirely unsanctioned
+by the conventions of society.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>34. <span class="smcap">To Mrs. Wordsworth</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+East India House.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+February 18, 1818.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,</p>
+
+<p>I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to
+answer your kind letter. My sister should more
+properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider
+myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do
+it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill
+which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures
+and names of gourds, cassia, cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or
+tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.
+The reason why I cannot write letters at home is, that I
+am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now)&mdash;Plato's
+double animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+re-united in the system of its first creation than I sometimes
+do to be but for a moment single and separate.
+Except my morning's walk to the office, which is like
+treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.
+I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend
+offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All
+the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast
+up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and
+write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other,
+and yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling
+thoughts all my own,"&mdash;faint memory of some passage in
+a book, or the tone of an absent friend's voice&mdash;a snatch of
+Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine
+plain face. The two operations might be going on at the
+same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions
+(earth's I mean), or as I sometimes turn round till I am
+giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
+longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of veal
+twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up
+the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the
+Belles Lettres&mdash;the gay science&mdash;who come to me as a
+sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of
+British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc,&mdash;what Coleridge
+said at the lecture last night&mdash;who have the form of
+reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to
+them, but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans
+born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an
+Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last,
+before they should find it. These pests worrit me at
+business, and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts,
+poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire,
+puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming
+in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
+which had come to an amicable compromise but for them.
+Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me
+home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at
+length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
+mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my
+cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of
+mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. Hazlitt,
+or Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon, or my
+brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone&mdash;a
+process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion.
+O the pleasure of eating alone!&mdash;eating my dinner
+alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it
+absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange;
+for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me,
+if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then <i>that</i>
+wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred
+of my interrupters&mdash;(God bless 'em! I love some of 'em
+dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to
+their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me,
+choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand
+they leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never,
+I would say to those spoilers of my dinner; but if you
+come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not
+happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise,
+that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
+dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company
+I should always like had I any mornings, but I am
+saturated with human faces (<i>divine</i> forsooth!) and voices
+all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would
+be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I
+assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get
+two, or one to myself. I am never C. L. but always
+C. L. and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity
+of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
+there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once
+a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone,
+I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just
+close to my bedroom window is the club-room of a public-house,
+where a set of singers, I take them to be chorus-singers
+of the two theatres (it must be both of them),
+begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive)
+who, being limited by their talents to the burthen of the
+song at the play-houses, in revenge have got the common
+popular airs by Bishop, or some cheap composer, arranged
+for choruses; that is, to be sung all in chorus. At least
+I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing
+but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. "That
+fury being quenched"&mdash;the howl, I mean&mdash;a burden
+succeeds of shouts and clapping, and knocking of the table.
+At length overtasked nature drops under it, and escapes
+for a few hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures
+of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at cockcrow.
+And then I think of the words Christabel's father
+used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every
+morning by way of variety when he awoke:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Every knell, the Baron saith,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wakes us up to a world of death"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted
+tale, is, that by my central situation I am a little
+over-companied. Not that I have any animosity against
+the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the
+harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a
+cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea,
+between office confinement and after-office society, how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+little time I can call my own. I mean only to draw a
+picture, not to make an inference. I would not that I
+know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I
+could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
+and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome,
+and carried away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even
+a kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured with that
+kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises
+don't hear me&mdash;I mean no disrespect, or I should explain
+myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
+the return of W. W. etc., seven times in 104 weeks, some
+more equal distribution might be found. I have scarce
+room to put in Mary's kind love, and my poor name,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>C. <span class="smcap">Lamb</span>.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*</p>
+
+<p>W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making
+copious use of quotations from said W. W. to give a zest
+to said lectures. S. T. C. is lecturing with success. I have
+not heard either of him or H., but dined with S. T. C. at
+Gillman's a Sunday or two since, and he was well and in
+good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course but
+lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
+lecturer may be. If <i>read</i>, they are dismal flat, and you
+can't think why you are brought together to hear a man
+read his works, which you could read so much better at
+leisure yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in
+pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the
+orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in
+honour of me at the London tavern.<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> "Gentlemen," said I,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the
+necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth <i>will</i> go on,
+kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once
+more, which never can be realised. Between us there is
+a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and
+distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and
+that gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so
+strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I think I had an
+instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all such
+people&mdash;accountants' deputy-accountants. The dear
+abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as
+she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes
+herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe
+and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of
+Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter
+days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived
+in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters,
+can go. They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor
+Nero. By a decree passed this week they have abridged
+us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
+o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left
+us. Dear W. W., be thankful for liberty.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph
+which, stating that an inquest had been held on some one who,
+after lecturing somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded
+thus: "Verdict: death from natural causes."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+<h2>GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It is one of the commonest of commonplaces that there
+are certain subjects and persons who and which always
+cause difference of opinion: and something like a full
+century has established the fact that Byron is one of them.
+As far as his poetry is concerned we have nothing to do
+with this difference or these differences. They affect his
+letters less, inasmuch as almost everybody admits them to
+be remarkably good of their kind. But when the further
+questions are raised, "What <i>is</i> that kind?" and "Is it
+the best, or even a very good kind?" the old division
+manifests itself again. That they are extraordinarily <i>clever</i>
+is again more or less matter of agreement. That they make
+some people dislike him more than they otherwise might
+is perhaps not a fatal objection: for the people may be
+wrong. Besides, as a matter of fact, they sometimes make
+other people <i>like</i> him more than they would have done
+without these letters: so the two things at least cancel
+each other. The chief objection to them, which is hardly
+removable, is their too frequent artificiality. Byron did
+not play the tricks that Pope played: for, he was not, like
+Pope, an invalid with an invalid's weaknesses and excuses.
+But almost more than in his poems, where the "dramatic"
+excuse is available, (<i>i.e.</i> that the writer is speaking not for
+himself but for the character) the letters provoke the
+question, "Is this what the man thought, felt, did, or what
+he wished to seem to feel, think, do?" In other words,
+"Is this <i>persona</i> or <i>res</i>?" The following shows Byron in
+perhaps as favourable a light as any that could be chosen,
+and with as little of the artificiality as is anywhere to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+found. It is true that even here Moore, his biographer and
+letter-giver, at first included, though he afterwards cut out,
+some attacks on Sir Samuel Romilly, whom Byron thought
+guilty of causing or abetting dissension between Lady
+Byron and himself. But the letter loses nothing by the
+omission and does not even gain unfairly by it. There is
+nothing <i>false</i> in the contrast of comedy and sentiment
+concerning the cemetery. His impression by the epitaphs
+Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is there any
+affectation in his remarks about his own burial, about his
+children, or any other subject. They did "pickle him and
+bring him home" (a quotation, not quite literal, from
+Sheridan's <i>Rivals</i>), and his funeral procession through
+London is the theme of a memorable passage in Borrow's
+<i>Lavengro</i>. "Juan" is of course <i>Don Juan</i>. "Allegra," his
+daughter by Jane (or as she re-christened herself, Claire)
+Clairmont&mdash;step-daughter of Godwin, through his second
+wife, and so a connection though no relation of Mrs. Shelley&mdash;died
+at five years old. "Ada," his and Lady Byron's
+only child, lived to marry Lord Lovelace, and continued
+his blood to the present day. "Electra" works out no
+further than the fact of her being the daughter of his
+"<i>moral</i> Clytemnestra," as he called Lady Byron, from her
+having been almost as fatal to his reputation as the actual
+Clytemnestra to her husband's life.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>35. <span class="smcap">To Mr. Murray</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Bologna, June 7. 1817.</p>
+
+<p>Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days
+ago from Ferrara. It will therefore be idle in
+him or you to wait for any further answers or
+returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no
+English letters be sent after me. The publication can be
+proceeded in without, and I am already sick of your
+remarks, to which I think not the least attention ought to
+be paid.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Tell Mr. Hobhouse that since I wrote to him I had
+availed myself of my Ferrara letters, and found the
+society much younger and better than that at Venice. I
+am very much pleased with the little the shortness of
+my stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count
+Mosti, and his family and friends in general.</p>
+
+<p>I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous
+Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative.
+I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna,
+beyond the walls and found, besides the superb burial
+ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the
+gravedigger in <i>Hamlet</i>.</p>
+
+<p>He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the
+forehead, and taking down one of them said "This is
+Brother Desiderio Birro, who died at forty&mdash;one of my
+best friends. I begged his head of his brethren after his
+decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime and then
+boiled it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation.
+He was the merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew.
+Wherever he went he brought joy, and whenever anyone
+was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make
+him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might
+have taken him for a dancer&mdash;he joked&mdash;he laughed&mdash;oh!
+he was such a Frate as I never saw before, nor ever
+shall again!"</p>
+
+<p>He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses
+in the cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to
+them and to his dead people; that since 1801 they had
+buried fifty-three thousand persons. In showing some
+older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of
+twenty, with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess
+Bartorini, dead two centuries ago: he said that, on
+opening her grave, they had found her hair complete, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+"as yellow as gold."<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara
+pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at
+Bologna; for instance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+"MARTINI LUIGI<br />
+IMPLORA PACE."</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+"LUCREZIA PICINI<br />
+IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE."</p>
+
+<p>Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words
+say all that can be said or sought, the dead had had
+enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they
+<i>implore</i>!</p>
+
+<p>There is all the helplessness and humble hope, and
+deathlike prayer, that can arise from the grave&mdash;'implora
+pace.' I hope, whoever may survive me, and shall see
+me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at the Lido,
+within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two
+words, and no more, put over me. I trust they won't
+think of "pickling, and bringing me home to clod or
+Blunderbuss Hall." I am sure my bones would not rest
+in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that
+country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on
+my death-bed, could I suppose that any of my friends
+would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your
+soil. I would not even feed your worms if I could help it.</p>
+
+<p>So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished
+Duke of Norfolk, who died at Venice (see <i>Richard II.</i>), that
+he, after fighting</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And toiled with works of war, retired himself<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">To Italy, and there, at <i>Venice</i>, gave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His body to that <i>pleasant</i> country's earth.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under whose colours he had fought so long!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late,
+and Mr. Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for
+further answers from me, but address yours to Venice as
+usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I may
+return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this
+depends on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well,
+as well as his son and Mrs. Hoppner. My daughter
+Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty; her hair is
+growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and
+her ways, Mrs. H. says, are like mine, as well as her
+features: she will make, in that case, a manageable young
+lady.</p>
+
+<p>I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra
+of my Mycenae. But there will come a day of reckoning,
+even if I should not live to see it. What a long letter I
+have scribbled.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Yours &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the
+tombs. I saw a quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses,
+scattered over the graves at Ferrara. It has the most
+pleasing effect you can imagine.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer
+two thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though
+<i>her</i> tresses are not "yellow."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>It may sometimes seem as if there were only two things
+that Shelley lacked&mdash;humour and common sense. As a
+matter of fact he possessed both, but allowed them to be
+perpetually stifled by other elements&mdash;not in themselves
+necessarily bad&mdash;of his character. If either&mdash;still better
+both&mdash;had been able to constitute themselves monarchs of
+his Brentford, Duumvirs of the rest, his political and
+religious extravagances would have been curbed; his less
+admirable actions would probably&mdash;for he would not have
+married and therefore would not have deserted poor Harriet&mdash;have
+been obviated; and it is by no means necessary
+that his poetry, though it could not have been much improved,
+should have been in any degree worsened. Shakespeare,
+one thinks, had plenty of both. Nor is this consideration
+irrelevant to the study of his letters. There are
+glimmerings of the humour which shines in <i>Peter Bell the
+Third</i>, and more of the common sense which is not needed,
+but by no means negatived, in the sublimer poems. But in
+the case suggested we should certainly have had more of
+them in a department than which they could have found
+no better home. Shelley wrote everything (after his
+intellectual infancy) that he did write, so excellently that
+he must have excelled here also. As it is, we must take
+him as we find him and be thankful. Since he wrote the
+following, English readers have perhaps been satiated with
+writings about Art. But rather more than 100 years ago
+there had been comparatively little of it and hardly anything,
+if anything at all, of this quality. And it may not
+be absurd to draw attention to the differences between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+these descriptions and those in ornate prose that we have
+had since from Mr. Ruskin and others. Most of the latter
+are essentially prose though often very beautiful prose:
+Shelley's, though pure prose in form, are as it were scenarios
+for poetry. Indeed by this time poetry had taken almost
+entire possession of him, and he of her.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>36. <span class="smcap">To Thomas Love Peacock</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">Bologna</span>,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+Monday, Nov[ember] 9, 1818.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Peacock,</p>
+
+<p>I have seen a quantity of things here&mdash;churches,
+palaces, statues, fountains, and
+pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio
+of an architect, or a print-shop, or a commonplace-book,
+I will try to recollect something of what I have seen; for,
+indeed, it requires, if it will obey, an act of volition. First,
+we went to the cathedral, which contains nothing remarkable,
+except a kind of shrine, or rather a marble canopy,
+loaded with sculptures, and supported on four marble
+columns. We went then to a palace&mdash;I am sure I forget
+the name of it&mdash;where we saw a large gallery of pictures.
+Of course, in a picture gallery you see three hundred
+pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember,
+however, an interesting picture by Guido, of
+the Rape of Proserpine, in which Proserpine casts back
+her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were, to the
+flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna.
+There was an exquisitely executed piece of Correggio,
+about four saints, one of whom seemed to have a pet
+dragon in a leash. I was told that it was the devil who
+was bound in that style&mdash;but who can make anything of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+four saints? For what can they be supposed to be about?
+There was one painting, indeed, by this master, Christ
+beatified, inexpressibly fine. It is a half figure, seated on
+a mass of clouds, tinged with an ethereal, rose-like lustre;
+the arms are expanded; the whole frame seems dilated
+with expression; the countenance is heavy, as it were,
+with the weight of the rapture of the spirit; the lips
+parted, but scarcely parted, with the breath of intense but
+regulated passion; the eyes are calm and benignant; the
+whole features harmonised in majesty and sweetness. The
+hair is parted on the forehead, and falls in heavy locks on
+each side. It is motionless, but seems as if the faintest
+breath would move it. The colouring, I suppose, must
+be very good, if I could remark and understand it. The
+sky is of pale a&euml;rial orange, like the tints of latest sunset;
+it does not seem painted around and beyond the figure,
+but everything seems to have absorbed, and to have been
+penetrated by its hues. I do not think we saw any other
+of Correggio, but this specimen gives me a very exalted
+idea of his powers.</p>
+
+<p>We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces&mdash;Ranuzzi,
+Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian
+names for any purpose, here they are; I should be glad
+of them if I was writing a novel. I saw many more of
+Guido. One, a Samson drinking water out of an ass's
+jaw-bone, in the midst of the slaughtered Philistines.
+Why he is supposed to do this, God, who gave him this
+jaw-bone, alone knows&mdash;but certain it is, that the painting
+is a very fine one. The figure of Samson stands in strong
+relief in the foreground, coloured, as it were, in the hues
+of human life, and full of strength and elegance. Round
+him lie the Philistines in all the attitudes of death. One
+prone, with the slight convulsion of pain just passing from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+his forehead, whilst on his lips and chin death lies as heavy
+as sleep. Another leaning on his arm, with his hand,
+white and motionless, hanging out beyond. In the
+distance, more dead bodies; and, still further beyond,
+the blue sea and the blue mountains, and one white and
+tranquil sail.</p>
+
+<p>There is a Murder of the Innocents, also, by Guido,
+finely coloured, with much fine expression&mdash;but the subject
+is very horrible, and it seemed deficient in strength&mdash;at
+least, you require the highest ideal energy, the most
+poetical and exalted conception of the subject, to reconcile
+you to such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ
+crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed,
+whatever may be the conception and execution of it, of
+seeing that monotonous and agonised form for ever
+exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of torture. But the
+Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of passive
+and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen
+hair, and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in
+passionate compassion; his hands clasped, and his fingers
+twisting themselves together, as it were, with involuntary
+anguish; his feet almost writhing up from the ground
+with the same sympathy; and the whole of this arrayed
+in colours of diviner nature, yet most like nature's self.
+Of the contemplation of this one would never weary.</p>
+
+<p>There was a "Fortune," too, of Guido; a piece of mere
+beauty. There was the figure of Fortune on a globe,
+eagerly proceeding onwards, and Love was trying to catch
+her back by the hair, and her face was half turned towards
+him; her long chestnut hair was floating in the stream
+of the wind, and threw its shadow over her fair forehead.
+Her hazel eyes were fixed on her pursuer, with a meaning
+look of playfulness, and a light smile was hovering on her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+lips. The colours which arrayed her delicate limbs were
+ethereal and warm.</p>
+
+<p>But, perhaps, the most interesting of all the pictures of
+Guido which I saw was a Madonna Lattante. She is
+leaning over her child, and the maternal feelings with which
+she is pervaded are shadowed forth on her soft and gentle
+countenance, and in her simple and affectionate gestures&mdash;there
+is what an unfeeling observer would call a dulness in
+the expression of her face; her eyes are almost closed;
+her lip depressed; there is a serious, and even a heavy
+relaxation, as it were, of all the muscles which are called
+into action by ordinary emotions: but it is only as if the
+spirit of love, almost insupportable from its intensity, were
+brooding over and weighing down the soul, or whatever it
+is, without which the material frame is inanimate and
+inexpressive.</p>
+
+<p>There is another painter here, called Franceschini, a
+Bolognese, who, though certainly very inferior to Guido,
+is yet a person of excellent powers. One entire church,
+that of Santa Catarina, is covered by his works. I do not
+know whether any of his pictures have ever been seen in
+England. His colouring is less warm than that of Guido,
+but nothing can be more clear and delicate; it is as if he
+could have dipped his pencil in the hues of some serenest
+and star-shining twilight. His forms have the same
+delicacy and a&euml;rial loveliness; their eyes are all bright
+with innocence and love; their lips scarce divided by some
+gentle and sweet emotion. His winged children are the
+loveliest ideal beings ever created by the human mind.
+These are generally, whether in the capacity of Cherubim
+or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture; and the
+underplot of their lovely and infantine play is something
+almost pathetic from the excess of its unpretending beauty.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
+One of the best of his pieces is an Annunciation of the
+Virgin:&mdash;the Angel is beaming in beauty; the Virgin,
+soft, retiring, and simple.</p>
+
+<p>We saw, besides, one picture of Raphael&mdash;St. Cecilia:
+this is in another and higher style; you forget that it is a
+picture as you look at it; and yet it is most unlike any of
+those things which we call reality. It is of the inspired
+and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
+executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced
+among the ancients those perfect specimens of
+poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of
+succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection
+in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
+Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her
+image in the painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent
+eyes lifted up; her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead&mdash;she
+holds an organ in her hands&mdash;her countenance,
+as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
+and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant
+light of life. She is listening to the music of heaven, and,
+as I imagine, has just ceased to sing, for the four figures
+that surround her evidently point, by their attitudes,
+towards her; particularly St. John, who, with a tender
+yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards
+her, languid with the depth of his emotion. At her feet
+lie various instruments of music, broken and unstrung.
+Of the colouring I do not speak; it eclipses nature, yet it
+has all her truth and softness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A good deal has already been said of Keats in the Introduction;
+but a little more may be pardoned on that most
+remarkable correspondence with his brother and sister-in-law
+which is there mentioned, and which it is hoped may
+be fairly sampled here. There is nothing quite like it:
+and one can only be thankful to the Atlantic (which here at
+least can have "disappointed" nobody worth mentioning)
+for causing the separation that brought it about. The
+inspirations which it shows were happily double. We do
+not know very much about George Keats, but John's
+family affection was of the keenest, and this was the only
+member of the family who was, in all the circumstances,
+likely to sympathise thoroughly with the poet in his poetry
+as in other things. Georgiana is said to have been personally
+attractive and mentally gifted beyond the common: and
+there is no doubt that this excited something more than
+mere family devotion in such an impressionable person as
+Keats. The combined reagency of these relatives has given
+us what we have from no other English poet&mdash;for the simple
+reason that no other English poet has had such a chance of
+giving it to us. The only thing to regret is that it could
+not continue longer: and that is only a necessary operation
+of Fate. The particular passage chosen here is one of the
+best known perhaps, but it is also one of the most illuminating:
+for it gives at once Keats's natural and simple
+interest in ordinary things, with no mere trivialities: his
+<i>real</i> attitude (so different from that long attributed to him!)
+as regards the attacks of critics, and his passion for beauty
+apart from mere hedonism. The "Charmian" was at one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+time supposed to be Miss Brawne: but this was an error.
+She was a Miss Jane Cox, and nothing is heard of her
+afterwards.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>37. <span class="smcap">To George and Georgiana Keats</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>[October 14 or 15, 1818]</p>
+
+<p>I came by ship from Inverness, and was nine days at
+Sea without being sick. A little qualm now and then
+put me in mind of you; however, as soon as you
+touch the shore, all the horrors of sickness are soon forgotten,
+as was the case with a lady on board, who could
+not hold her head up all the way. We had not been in the
+Thames an hour before her tongue began to some tune&mdash;paying
+off, as it was fit she should, all old scores. I was
+the only Englishman on board. There was a downright
+Scotchman, who, hearing that there had been a bad crop
+of potatoes in England, had brought some triumphant
+specimens from Scotland. These he exhibited with
+national pride to all the ignorant lightermen and watermen
+from the Nore to the Bridge. I fed upon beef all
+the way; not being able to eat the thick porridge which
+the Ladies managed to manage, with large, awkward, horn
+spoons into the bargain. Reynolds has returned from a
+six-weeks' enjoyment in Devonshire; he is well, and
+persuades me to publish my "Pot of Basil" as an answer
+to the attacks made on me in "Blackwood's Magazine"
+and the "Quarterly Review." There have been two
+Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and one in the
+Examiner, copied from the Exeter Paper, and written
+by Reynolds. I do not know who wrote those in the
+Chronicle. This is a mere matter of the moment&mdash;I
+think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+Even as a Matter of present interest the attempt to crush
+me in the "Quarterly" has only brought me more into
+notice, and it is a common expression among book-men,
+"I wonder the Quarterly should cut its own throat." It
+does me not the least harm in Society to make me appear
+little and ridiculous: I know when a man is superior to
+me and give him all due respect; he will be the last
+to laugh at me; and as for the rest I feel that I make an
+impression upon them which insures me personal respect
+while I am in sight, whatever they may say when my
+back is turned.</p>
+
+<p>The Misses &mdash;&mdash; are very kind to me, but they have
+lately displeased me much, and in this way: Now I am
+coming the Richardson! On my return, the first day
+I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
+Cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her Grandpapa
+in a serious manner, was invited by Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; to take
+asylum in her house. She is an East-Indian, and ought
+to be her grandfather's heir. At the time I called, Mrs.
+&mdash;&mdash; was in conference with her upstairs, and the young
+ladies were warm in her praises downstairs, calling her
+genteel, interesting and a thousand other pretty things to
+which I gave no heed, not being partial to nine-days'
+wonders&mdash;Now all is completely changed&mdash;they hate her,
+and from what I hear she is not without faults of a real
+kind: but she has others, which are more apt to make
+women of inferior charms hate her. She is not a Cleopatra,
+but is, at least, a Charmian. She has a rich Eastern
+look; she has fine eyes and fine manners. When she
+comes into the room she makes an impression the same
+as the Beauty of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too
+conscious of herself to repulse any Man who may address
+her; from habit she thinks that nothing <i>particular</i>. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+always find myself more at ease with such a woman: the
+picture before me always gives me a life and animation
+which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am
+at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward
+or in a tremble: I forget myself entirely, because
+I live in her. You will, by this time, think that I am in
+love with her, so, before I go any further, I will tell you
+I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of
+Mozart's might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and
+an amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than
+a conversation with an imperial woman, the very "yes"
+and "no" of whose life is to me a banquet. I don't cry
+to take the moon home with me in my pocket, nor do
+I fret to leave her behind me. I like her, and her like,
+because one has no <i>sensations</i>; what we both are is taken
+for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much
+talk with her&mdash;no such thing; there are the Misses &mdash;&mdash;
+on the look out. They think I don't admire her because
+I don't stare at her; they call her a flirt to me&mdash;what
+a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such
+a manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic
+power; this they call flirting! They do not know
+things; they do not know what a woman is. I believe,
+though, she has faults; the same as Charmian and Cleopatra
+might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking
+in a worldly way; for there are two distinct tempers of
+mind in which we judge of things&mdash;the worldly, theatrical
+and pantomimical; and the unearthly, spiritual and
+ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron and
+this Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the
+latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's
+cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings.
+As a man of the world I love the rich talk of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+Charmian; as an eternal being I love the thought of you.
+I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to
+save me.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I am free from men of pleasure's cares,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is "Lord Byron," and is one of the finest things he
+has said.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">THE CARLYLES&mdash;THOMAS (1795-1881) and<br />
+JANE WELSH (1801-1866)</span></h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A paradoxer, even of a less virulent-frivolous type than
+that with which we have been recently afflicted, might
+sustain, for some little time at any rate, the argument against
+preservation of letters from the case of this eminent couple.
+If Mrs. Carlyle had not written hers, or if they had remained
+unknown, the whole sickening controversy about the
+character and married life of the pair might, as was said in
+the Introduction, never have existed. And if Carlyle himself
+had written none, persons of any intelligence would
+still have had a pretty adequate idea of him from his
+<i>Works</i>. On the other hand the addition to knowledge in
+his case is quite welcome: and in hers it practically gives
+us what we could hardly have known otherwise&mdash;one of
+the most remarkable of woman-natures, and one of the
+most striking confirmations of the merciless adage "Whom
+the gods curse, to them they grant the desires of their
+hearts." For she wanted above all things to be the wife
+of a man of genius&mdash;and she was. So the <i>pro</i> and the <i>con</i> in
+this matter may so far be set against each other. But there
+remains to credit a considerable amount of most welcome
+and (notably in the instance specified in the Introduction)
+almost consummate literature of the epistolary kind. This
+instance itself is perhaps too tragic for our little collection:
+indeed it might help to spread the exaggerated idea of the
+writer's unhappiness which has been too prevalent already.
+There is some "metal more attractive" in her letters,
+which perhaps, taken all round, put her with Madame de
+S&eacute;vign&eacute; and "Lady Mary" at the head of all <i>published</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+women letter-writers. And Carlyle's annotations to them,
+when not too bilious or too penitent, show him almost at
+his best. His own (given below) to FitzGerald (the way in
+which epistolary literature interconnects itself has been
+noted) appears to me one of his most characteristic though
+least volcanic utterances. It was written while he was in
+the depths of what his wife called "the Valley of the Shadow
+of Frederick," (<i>i.e.</i> his vast book on that amiable monarch)
+and had retired to <i>extra</i>-solitude in consequence. "Farlingay"
+refers to a recent stay in Suffolk with FitzGerald.
+As often with Carlyle, there may be more than one interpretation
+of his inverted commas at "gentleman" as
+regards Voltaire, to whom he certainly would not have
+allotted the word in its best sense. The phrase about
+Chaos and the Evil Genius is Carlyle shut up in narrow
+space like the other genius or genie in the Arabian
+Nights. The "<i>awful jangle</i> of bells" speaks his horror
+of any invading sound. The "Naseby matter" refers
+to a monument which he and FitzGerald had planned, and
+which (with the precedent investigation as to the battle
+which F. had conducted years before for his <i>Cromwell</i>),
+occupies a good deal of FitzGerald's own correspondence.
+Indeed, it is thanks to Naseby that we possess this very
+letter. FitzGerald says elsewhere that he kept only these
+Naseby letters of all Carlyle's correspondence with him,
+destroying the rest, as he did Thackeray's and Tennyson's,
+lest "private personal history should fall into some unscrupulous
+hands." One admires the conduct while one
+feels the loss. As for the monument, it never came off:
+though it was talked about for some thirty years. Mrs.
+Carlyle's&mdash;one of the early and, despite complaints, cheerful
+time, the other later and, despite its resignation, from "the
+Valley of the Shadow"&mdash;require no annotation, save in
+respect of Carlyle's own on <i>Deerbrook</i>. He might well call
+it "poor": it is indeed one of the few novels by a writer of
+any distinction, which one tolerably voracious novel-reader
+has found incapable of being read. And this is curious:
+for she had written good stories earlier.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>38. <span class="smcap">To Edward Fitzgerald</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">Addiscombe Farm, Croydon.</span><br />
+15th Septr. 1855&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Dear Fitzgerald,</p>
+
+<p>I have been here ever since the day you last
+heard of me; leading the strangest life of
+absolute <i>Latrappism</i>; and often enough remembering
+Farlingay and you. I live perfectly alone, and without
+speech at all,&mdash;there being in fact nobody to speak to,
+except one austerely punctual housemaid, who does her
+functions, like an eight-day clock, generally without
+bidding. My wife comes out now and then to give the
+requisite directions; but commonly withdraws again on
+the morrow, leaving the monster to himself and his own
+ways. I have Books; a complete Edition of <i>Voltaire</i>, for
+one Book, in which I read for <i>use</i>, or for idleness oftenest,&mdash;getting
+into endless reflexions over it, mostly of a sad
+and not very utterable nature. I find V. a 'gentleman,'
+living in a world partly furnished with such; and that
+there are now almost no 'gentlemen' (not quite <i>none</i>):
+this is one great head of my reflexions, to which there is
+no visible <i>tail</i> or finish. I have also a Horse (borrowed
+from my fat Yeoman friend, who is at sea-bathing in
+Sussex); and I go riding, at great lengths daily, over hill
+and dale; this I believe is really the main good I am
+doing,&mdash;if in this either there be much good. But it is
+a strange way of life to me, for the time; perhaps not
+unprofitable; To let <i>Chaos</i> say out its say, then, and one's
+Evil Genius give one the very worst language he has, for
+a while. It is still to last for a week or more. Today,
+for the first time, I ride back to Chelsea, but mean to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
+return hither on Monday. There is a great circle of
+yellow light all the way from Shooter's Hill to Primrose
+Hill, spread round my horizon every night, I see it while
+smoking my pipe before bed (so bright, last night, it cast
+a visible shadow of me against the white window-shutters);
+and this is all I have to do with London and its <i>gases</i> for a
+fortnight or more. My wife writes to me, there was an
+awful jangle of bells last day she went home from this;
+a Quaker asked in the railway, of some porter, 'Can thou
+tell me what these bells mean?'&mdash;'Well, I suppose something
+is up. They say Sebastopol is took, and the Rushans
+run away.'&mdash;<i>&Agrave; la bonne heure</i>; but won't they come back
+again, think you?</p>
+
+<p>On the whole I say, when you get your little Suffolk
+cottage, you must have in it a 'chamber in the wall' for
+me, <i>plus</i> a pony that can trot, and a cow that gives good
+milk: with these outfits we shall make a pretty rustication
+now and then, not wholly <i>Latrappish</i>, but only <i>half</i>, on
+much easier terms than here; and I shall be right willing
+to come and try it, I for one party.&mdash;Meanwhile, I hope
+the Naseby matter is steadily going ahead; sale <i>completed</i>;
+and even the <i>monument</i> concern making way.
+Tell me a little how that and other matters are. If you
+are at home, a line is rapidly conveyed hither, steam all
+the way: after the beginning of the next week, I am at
+Chelsea, and (I dare so) there is a fire in the evenings now
+to welcome you there. Shew face in some way or other.</p>
+
+<p>And so adieu; for my hour of riding is at hand.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Yours ever truly,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">T. Carlyle</span>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>39. <span class="smcap">To Mrs. Walsh</span>,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Chelsea</span>: Sept. 5, 1836.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Aunt,</p>
+
+<p>Now that I am fairly settled at home again,
+and can look back over my late travels with
+the coolness of a spectator, it seems to me that I must have
+tired out all men, women and children that have had to
+do with me by the road. The proverb says 'there is
+much ado when cadgers ride.' I do not know precisely
+what 'cadger' means, but I imagine it to be a character
+like me, liable to head-ache, to sea-sickness, to all the
+infirmities 'that flesh is heir to,' and a few others besides;
+the friends and relations of cadgers should therefore use
+all soft persuasions to induce them to remain at home.<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a></p>
+
+<p>I got into that Mail the other night with as much
+repugnance and trepidation as if it had been a Phalaris'
+brazen bull, instead of a Christian vehicle, invented for
+purposes of mercy&mdash;not of cruelty. There were three
+besides myself when we started, but two dropped off at
+the end of the first stage, and the rest of the way I had,
+as usual, half of the coach to myself. My fellow-passenger
+had that highest of all terrestrial qualities, which for me a
+fellow-passenger can possess&mdash;he was silent. I think his
+name was Roscoe, and he read sundry long papers to himself,
+with the pondering air of a lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>We breakfasted at Lichfield, at five in the morning, on
+muddy coffee and scorched toast, which made me once
+more lyrically recognise in my heart (not without a sign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+of regret) the very different coffee and toast with which
+you helped me out of my headache. At two there was
+another stop of ten minutes, that might be employed in
+lunching or otherwise. Feeling myself more fevered than
+hungry, I determined on spending the time in combing
+my hair and washing my face and hands with vinegar.
+In the midst of this solacing operation I heard what
+seemed to be the Mail running its rapid course, and quick
+as lightning it flashed on me, 'There it goes! and my
+luggage is on the top of it, and my purse is in the pocket
+of it, and here am I stranded on an unknown beach, without
+so much as a sixpence in my pocket to pay for the
+vinegar I have already consumed!' Without my bonnet,
+my hair hanging down my back, my face half dried, and
+the towel, with which I was drying it, firm grasped in my
+hand, I dashed out&mdash;along, down, opening wrong doors,
+stumbling over steps, cursing the day I was born, still
+more the day on which I took a notion to travel, and
+arrived finally at the bar of the Inn, in a state of excitement
+bordering on lunacy. The barmaids looked at me
+'with wonder and amazement.' 'Is the coach gone?'
+I gasped out. 'The coach? Yes!' 'Oh! and you
+have let it away without me! Oh! stop it, cannot you
+stop it?' and out I rushed into the street, with streaming
+hair and streaming towel, and almost brained myself
+against&mdash;the Mail! which was standing there in all
+stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had
+heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended
+like a maniac, I ascended again like a fool, and dried the
+other half of my face, and put on my bonnet, and came
+back 'a sadder and a wiser woman.'</p>
+
+<p>I did not find my husband at the 'Swan with Two
+Necks'; for we were in a quarter of an hour before the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+appointed time. So I had my luggage put on the backs
+of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, where I
+presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By and by, however,
+the omnibus stopped, and amid cries of 'No room, sir,'
+'Can't get in,' Carlyle's face, beautifully set off by a
+broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the door, like the
+Peri, who, 'at the Gate of Heaven, stood disconsolate.'
+In hurrying along the Strand, pretty sure of being too
+late, amidst all the imaginable and unimaginable phenomena
+which the immense thoroughfare of a street presents,
+his eye (Heaven bless the mark!) had lighted on my trunk
+perched on the top of the omnibus, and had recognised
+it. This seems to me one of the most indubitable proofs
+of genius which he ever manifested. Happily, a passenger
+went out a little further on, and then he got in.</p>
+
+<p>My brother-in-law had gone two days before, so my
+arrival was most well-timed. I found all at home right
+and tight; my maid seems to have conducted herself
+quite handsomely in my absence; my best room looked
+really inviting. A bust of Shelley (a present from Leigh
+Hunt), and a fine print of Albert Durer, handsomely
+framed (also a present) had still further ornamented it
+during my absence. I also found (for I wish to tell you
+all my satisfaction) every grate in the house furnished
+with a supply of coloured clippings, and the holes in the
+stair-carpet all darned, so that it looks like new. They
+gave me tea and fried bacon, and staved off my headache
+as well as might be. They were very kind to me, but, on
+my life, everybody is kind to me, and to a degree that fills
+me with admiration. I feel so strong a wish to make you
+all convinced how very deeply I feel your kindness, and
+just the more I would say, the less able I am to say anything.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>God bless you all. Love to all, from the head of the
+house down to Johnny.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Your affectionate,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Jane W. Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>40. <span class="smcap">To Mrs. Stirling, Hill Street, Edinburgh.</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>5 <span class="smcap">Cheyne Row, Chelsea</span>: October 21, 1859.</p>
+
+<p>You dear nice woman! there you are! a bright
+cheering apparition to surprise one on a foggy
+October morning, over one's breakfast&mdash;that most
+trying institution for people who are 'nervous' and
+'don't sleep!'</p>
+
+<p>It (the photograph) made our breakfast this morning
+'pass off,' like the better sort of breakfasts in Deerbrook,<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>
+in which people seemed to have come into the world
+chiefly to eat breakfast in every possible variety of temper!</p>
+
+<p>Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him
+above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given
+more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than
+anything that has 'cast<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> up' in my time or is like to&mdash;this
+art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves
+of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And
+mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the
+country? I assure you I have often gone into my own
+room, in the devil's own humour&mdash;ready to answer at
+'things in general,' and some things in particular&mdash;and,
+my eyes resting by chance on one of my photographs of
+long-ago places and people, a crowd of sad, gentle thoughts
+has rushed into my heart, and driven the devil out, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
+clean as ever so much holy water and priestly exorcism
+could have done! I have a photograph of Haddington
+church tower, and my father's tombstone in it&mdash;of every
+place I ever lived at as a home&mdash;photographs of old lovers!
+old friends, old servants, old dogs! In a day or two, you,
+dear, will be framed and hung up among the 'friends.'
+And that bright, kind, indomitable face of yours will not
+be the least efficacious face there for exorcising my devil,
+when I have him! Thank you a thousand times for
+keeping your word! Of course you would&mdash;that is just
+the beauty of you, that you never deceive nor disappoint.</p>
+
+<p>Oh my dear! my dear! how awfully tired I was with
+the journey home, and yet I had taken two days to it,
+sleeping&mdash;that is, attempting to sleep&mdash;at York. What
+a pity it is that Scotland is so far off! all the good one has
+gained there gets shaken off one in the terrific journey
+home again, and then the different atmosphere is so
+trying to one fresh from the pure air of Fife&mdash;so exhausting
+and depressing. If it hadn't been that I had a deal of
+housemaiding to execute during the week I was here
+before Mr. C. returned, I must have given occasion for
+newspaper paragraphs under the head of 'Melancholy
+Suicide.' But dusting books, making chair covers, and
+'all that sort of thing,' leads one on insensibly to live&mdash;till
+the crisis gets safely passed.</p>
+
+<p>My dear! I haven't time nor inclination for much
+letter-writing&mdash;nor have you, I should suppose, but do
+let us exchange letters now and then. A friendship which
+has lived on air for so many years together is worth the
+trouble of giving it a little human sustenance.</p>
+
+<p>Give my kind regards to your husband&mdash;I like him&mdash;and
+believe me,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Your ever affectionate,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Jane Welsh Carlyle.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> Clever as she was, she surely made a mistake here&mdash;unless
+she did it on purpose, which is quite possible. "Cadger" is of
+course only "beggar," and the proverb is the Scotch equivalent
+of ours about the "beggar on horseback," pretty frequently
+illustrated now-a-days.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> The Deerbrook breakfasts refer to Miss Martineau's poor
+novel. (T. C.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> Turned. (T. C.)</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There are very few examples in biography where the
+publication of letters has had a happier effect on the general
+idea of the writer than in Macaulay's case. It is not here a
+question of historical trustworthiness, or even of literary-style,
+in both which respects he has come in for severe
+strictures and sometimes for rather half-hearted defence.
+Nor do the letters display any purely literary gifts in him
+(except perhaps a playfulness of humour or at least wit)
+which do not appear in the <i>History</i> and the <i>Essays</i>. But,
+as the exception may perhaps partly indicate, they extend
+and improve the notion of his personality in the most
+remarkable fashion. Even those who did not quarrel with
+his views sometimes, before Sir George Trevelyan's book,
+disliked and regretted what have been called his "pistolling
+ways"&mdash;the positive, hectoring "hold-your-tongue" sort
+of tone which dominated his productions. With the very
+rarest exceptions, themselves sometimes of a revealing and
+excusable frankness, this tone is, if not quite absent<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> from,
+much seldomer present in, his letters. He jokes without
+difficulty; talks without in the least monopolising the
+conversation; shows himself often willing to live and let
+live; and is on the whole as different a person as possible
+from the Macaulay who is sure that "every schoolboy"
+knows better than the author he is reviewing, and who finds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
+Johnson guilty of superstition and Swift of apostasy.
+"Happy thrice and more also" are those whose letters
+thus vindicate them. I have purposely chosen the following
+example (written to his sister) from the most <i>mundane</i>
+class. "Appointment" was to the <i>Indian</i> Council, which
+explains the "Cotton" and "Muslin" and other things.
+"Ellis" (Thomas Flower), a friend of Macaulay's from
+Cambridge days and his literary executor in part. "Lushington"
+(Stephen), a civilian lawyer of great eminence as
+a judge in Admiralty and ecclesiastical matters, but a
+rather violent politician. "Town"&mdash;Leeds. "Miss Berry"
+is annotated elsewhere. "Sir Stratford Canning," later
+Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, George Canning's cousin,
+and one of the most famous diplomatists of the nineteenth
+century, especially during his long tenure of the Embassy
+at Constantinople. <i>Vivian Grey</i>&mdash;Disraeli's first novel.
+"Lady Holland," the most famous hostess on the Whig
+side in the first half of the nineteenth century, but, by all
+accounts, a person now and then quite intolerable. "Allen"
+(John), an <i>Edinburgh Reviewer</i>, was familiarly called her
+"tame atheist" (All the company were of the Holland
+House "set"). "Bobus"&mdash;Robert Percy Smith, Sydney's
+elder brother, a great wit and scholar. "Cosher," an Irish
+word, is not always used in this sense of "chat."</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>41. <span class="smcap">To his Sister</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">London</span>: November 1833.</p>
+
+<p>Dear Hannah,</p>
+
+<p>Things stand as they stood; except that the
+report of my appointment is every day spreading
+more widely; and that I am beset by advertising
+dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts
+for me, and fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out
+of place begging to be my secretaries. I am not in very
+high spirits to-day, as I have just received a letter from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my intentions
+till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so
+plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are
+few indeed from whom I shall part with so much pain;
+and he, poor fellow, says that, next to his wife, I am the
+person for whom he feels the most thorough attachment,
+and in whom he places the most unlimited confidence.</p>
+
+<p>On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given
+to Lushington by the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He
+has persecuted me with importunities to attend and make
+a speech for him; and my father has joined in the request.
+It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a man who
+represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty
+thousand people to keep his own constituents in good
+humour; and the Spitalfields weavers and Whitechapel
+butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I succeeded
+in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous
+attempt of the kind ever made,&mdash;I mean in persuading an
+audience of manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that
+the immediate alteration of the corn-laws was impossible,&mdash;I
+have been considered as a capital physician for
+desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that
+delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not
+very popular with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks
+that an oration from me would give him a lift. I could
+not refuse him directly, backed as he was by my father.
+I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the
+11th, but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very
+probable that I should be out of town.</p>
+
+<p>I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's <i>soir&eacute;e</i>. I do not
+know whether I told you that she resented my article on
+Horace Walpole so much that Sir Stratford Canning
+advised me not to go near her. She was Walpole's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+greatest favourite. His Reminiscences are addressed to
+her in terms of the most gallant eulogy. When he was
+dying at past eighty, he asked her to marry him, merely
+that he might make her a Countess and leave her his
+fortune. You know that in <i>Vivian Grey</i> she is called
+Miss Otranto. I always expected that my article would
+put her into a passion, and I was not mistaken; but she
+has come round again, and sent me a most pressing and
+kind invitation the other day.</p>
+
+<p>I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with
+Rogers, and once with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most
+extraordinary state. She came to Rogers's, with Allen,
+in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally, and
+make common cause against her. There was not a person
+at table to whom she was not rude; and none of us
+were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered; Sydney made
+merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked excessively
+impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward
+rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to
+be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all,
+and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch
+say, were indeed tremendous. When she and all the rest
+were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down with
+him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of
+the evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing
+up in defence of his patroness the best thing that he has
+seen in him. No sooner had Tom and I got into the
+street than he broke forth: "That such an old stager as
+Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit
+for attachment to anything but his dinner! Allen was
+bursting with envy to see us so free, while he was conscious
+of his own slavery."</p>
+
+<p>Her Ladyship has been the better for this discipline.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+She has overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and
+invitations. I have at last found out the cause of her
+ill-humour, or at least of that portion of it of which I was
+the object. She is in a rage at my article on Walpole, but
+at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very
+intimate with the Waldegraves, to whom the manuscripts
+belong, and for whose benefit the letters were published.
+But my review was surely not calculated to injure the sale
+of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an aside, that he
+quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>A note; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland:
+"Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray wrap yourself very warm, and
+come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady. I am
+engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with
+the Directors of the East India Company; now my
+servants; next week, I hope, to be my masters.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Ever yours,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>T. B. M.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about
+"What is bred in the bone," etc.&mdash;as for instance when, while
+admitting Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the
+<i>Letters</i> "for the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to
+call such criticism itself "trashy."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Beddoes belongs to the small but remarkable company
+of authors who, making little mark in their own time and
+none at all for some time afterwards, before very long come
+into something like their due, though they never can be
+exactly popular. He was certainly very eccentric and
+possibly quite mad: the circumstances of his suicide do
+more than justify the hopes of charity and the convention
+of coroners' juries, as to the latter conclusion. But he was
+an extremely poetical poet and a letter-writer of remarkable
+individuality and zest. Little notice seems to have been
+taken, by any save a very few elect, of the first collected
+publication of his work just after his death: though a
+single piece, <i>The Bride's Tragedy</i>, not by any means his
+best, had obtained praise in 1822&mdash;a time between the great
+poetical outburst of the early nineteenth century and the
+revival of its middle period. But Mr. Gosse's reissue in
+completer form of the <i>Poems</i> in 1890 and the <i>Letters</i> four
+years later, lodged him at once in the affection of all competent
+critics. With something of the more eccentric
+spirit of the seventeenth century in him, and something of
+the Romantic revival as shown in Coleridge, Shelley and
+Keats, he had much of his own, though he never got it
+thoroughly or sustainedly organised and expressed. His
+mingled passion and humour (especially the latter) "escape"&mdash;make
+fitful spurts and explosions&mdash;in his correspondence.
+Latterly this reflects his mental breakdown, increasingly
+in the prose; though only a few years before the end it
+contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The swallow
+leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and Canon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span>
+Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is nothing
+beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good share,
+but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly heralds,
+though the thing is first definitely indicated in a later letter,
+Beddoes' marvellous tragedy <i>Death's Jest-book</i>, which he
+wrote and re-wrote till it became like the picture in Balzac's
+story an "Unknown [and Unknowable] Masterpiece." The
+letter is further remarkable as combining intense admiration
+for the <i>old</i> masterpieces with a quite "modern" insistence
+on "begetting" rather than "reviving"&mdash;on "giving the
+literature of the age a spirit of its own," etc. For details:
+"Sulky" (compare the French <i>d&eacute;sobligeante</i>, celebrated by
+Sterne)&mdash;an obsolete form of chaise. "Breaking Priscian's
+head" is familiar enough for "using bad grammar," which
+the book-keeper very likely did; but the explanation may
+be more remote. "Like a ghost from the tomb" though
+not "quoted" is, of course, his beloved Shelley's ("The
+Cloud"). "<i>Biped</i> knock" = merely "double"&mdash;the
+peculiar rat-tat which postmen have mostly forgotten or
+not learnt&mdash;perhaps regarding it as a badge of slavery like
+"tips." <i>The Fatal Dowry</i>&mdash;attributed to (Field and)
+Massinger, and spoilt by Rowe into his nevertheless popular
+<i>Fair Penitent</i>,&mdash;is one of the finest examples of the second
+stage of Elizabethan drama. <i>Ultracrepidarian</i>&mdash;a term
+derived from the Latin proverb <i>ne sutor supra</i> (or <i>ultra</i>)
+<i>crepidam</i> and specially applied to the unpopular critic
+Gifford who had been a shoemaker&mdash;meaning generally
+"some one who <i>does</i> go beyond his last and meddles with
+things he does not understand." "McCready's" (Macready,
+the famous actor and manager) friend Walker was probably
+Sidney Walker the Shakespearian critic.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>42. <span class="smcap">To Thomas Forbes Kelsall</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+26 <span class="smcap">Mall, Clifton</span>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+(Postmark, Jan. 11. 1825)</p>
+
+<p>Dear Kelsall&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Day after day since Christmas I have intended
+to write or go to London, and day after day
+I have deferred both projects; and now I will give you
+the adventures and mishaps of this present sunday. Remorse,
+and startling conscience, in the form of an old,
+sulky, and a shying, horse, hurried me to the 'Regulator'
+coach-office on Saturday: 'Does the Regulator and its
+team conform to the Mosaic decalogue, Mr. Book-keeper?'
+He broke Priscian's head, and through the aperture,
+assured me that it did not: I was booked for the inside:&mdash;"Call
+at 26 Mall for me."&mdash;"Yes, Sir, at 1/2 past five,
+<span class="smcap">a.m.</span>"&mdash;At five I rose like a ghost from the tomb, and
+betook me to coffee. No wheels rolled through the streets
+but the inaudible ones of that uncreated hour. It struck
+six,&mdash;a coach was called,&mdash;we hurried to the office but <i>the</i>
+coach was gone. Here followed a long Brutus-and-Cassius
+discourse between a shilling-buttoned-waistcoatteer of a
+porter and myself, which ended in my extending mercy
+to the suppliant coach-owners, and agreeing to accept a
+place for Monday. All well thus far. The biped knock
+of the post alighted on the door at twelve, and two letters
+were placed upon my German dictionary,&mdash;your own,
+which I at first intended to reply to viv&acirc; voce, had not
+the second informed me of my brother's arrival in England,
+his short leave of absence, and his intention to visit
+me here next week. This twisted my strong purpose like
+a thread, and disposed me to remain here about ten days<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+longer. On the 21st at latest I go to London. Be there
+and I will join you, or, if not, pursue you to Southampton.</p>
+
+<p>The Fatal Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind
+ultra-crepidarian&mdash;McCready's friend, Walker, very
+likely; but nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and
+might have been rendered very effective by docking it of
+the whole fifth act, which is an excrescence,&mdash;re-creating
+Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more ghost-gaping
+and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out
+the most purple piece in the whole web&mdash;the end of the
+fourth Act&mdash;and shouldered himself into toleration through
+the prejudices of the pit, when he should have built his
+admiration on their necks. Say what you will, I am convinced
+the man who is to awaken the drama must be a
+bold trampling fellow, no creeper into worm-holes, no
+reviver even, however good. These reanimations are
+vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &amp;c. are
+better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary
+of ours, but they are ghosts; the worm is in
+their pages; and we want to see something that our great-grandsires
+did not know. With the greatest reverence for
+all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we had
+better beget than revive; attempt to give the literature
+of this age an idiosyncrasy and spirit of its own, and only
+raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with&mdash;just now the
+drama is a haunted ruin.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p>
+<h2>ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Mrs. Browning was in the habit of using rather extravagant
+language herself: and she has certainly been the victim of
+language extravagant enough both in praise (the more
+damaging of the two) and blame from others. FitzGerald's
+unlucky exaggeration (see Introduction) in one way may be
+set off by such opposite assertions as that some of her poems
+are "the best of their kind in the English language." But
+her letters need cause no such alarums and excursions. If
+they are sometimes what is called by youth "Early
+Victorian"&mdash;"Early Anything," and "Middle Anything"
+and "Late Anything," are sure to be found sooner or later by
+all wise persons to have their own place in life and history.
+And sentimentalism has, in private prose, an infinitely less
+provocative character than when it is displayed in published
+verse. A distinguished Scotch philosopher of the last
+generation laid it down that, in literature, for demonstrative
+exhibitions of affection and sorrow "the occasion should be
+adequate, and the actuality rare." But letter-writing,
+though it can be eminently literary, is always literature with
+a certain license attached to it: arising from the fact that
+it was not&mdash;or ought not to have been&mdash;intended for
+publication. And that naturalness of which so much has
+been said is displayed constantly and by no means disagreeably
+in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epistles. In fact,
+you cannot help liking her the better for them&mdash;which
+in one way at least is the supreme test. The following,
+written soon after her marriage&mdash;an elopement of a kind,
+but certainly justifiable if ever one was&mdash;is a very pleasant
+specimen in more ways than one, as regards taste, temper,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
+and descriptive powers. It also contains no criticism, which
+in her case was apt to be extremely uncertain.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>43. <span class="smcap">To Mrs. Martin</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>(<span class="smcap">Pisa</span>) November 5, (1846)</p>
+
+<p>It was pleasant to me, my dearest friend, to think
+while I was reading your letter yesterday, that
+almost by that time you had received mine, and
+could not even seem to doubt a moment longer whether
+I admitted your claim of hearing and of speaking to the
+uttermost. I recognised you too entirely as my friend.
+Because you had put faith in me, so much the more reason
+there was that I should justify it as far as I could, and with
+as much frankness (which was a part of my gratitude to
+you) as was possible from a woman to a woman. Always
+I have felt that you have believed in me and loved me,
+and, for the sake of the past and of the present, your
+affection and your esteem are more to me than I could
+afford to lose, even in these changed and happy circumstances.
+So I thank you once more, my dear kind
+friends, I thank you both&mdash;I never shall forget your
+goodness. I feel it, of course, the more deeply, in proportion
+to the painful disappointment in other quarters....
+Am I bitter? The feeling, however, passes while I write
+it out, and my own affection for everybody will wait
+patiently to be 'forgiven' in the proper form, when
+everybody shall be at leisure properly. Assuredly, in the
+meanwhile, however, my case is not to be classed with
+other cases&mdash;what happened to me could not have
+happened, perhaps, with any other family in England....
+I hate and loathe everything too which is clandestine&mdash;we
+<i>both</i> do, Robert and I; and the manner the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
+business was carried on in might have instructed the least
+acute of the bystanders. The flowers standing perpetually
+on my table for the last two years were brought
+there by one hand, as everybody knew; and really it
+would have argued an excess of benevolence in an unmarried
+man with quite enough resources in London, to
+pay the continued visits he paid to me without some
+strong motive indeed. Was it his fault that he did not
+associate with everybody in the house as well as with me?
+He desired it; but no&mdash;that was not to be. The
+endurance of the pain of the position was not the least
+proof of his attachment to me. How I thank you for
+believing in him&mdash;how grateful it makes me! He will
+justify to the uttermost that faith. We have been married
+two months, and every hour has bound me to him more
+and more; if the beginning was well, still better it is
+now&mdash;that is what he says to me, and I say back again
+day by day. Then it is an 'advantage' to have an
+inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of all things
+in heaven and earth, and shows besides as perpetual a
+good humour and gaiety as if he were&mdash;a fool, shall I say?
+or a considerable quantity more, perhaps. As to our
+domestic affairs, it is not to <i>my</i> honour and glory that the
+'bills' are made up every week and paid more regularly
+'than bard beseems,' while dear Mrs. Jameson laughs
+outright at our miraculous prudence and economy, and
+declares that it is past belief and precedent that we should
+not burn the candles at both ends, and the next moment
+will have it that we remind her of the children in a poem
+of Heine's who set up housekeeping in a tub, and inquired
+gravely the price of coffee. Ah, but she has left Pisa at
+last&mdash;left it yesterday. It was a painful parting to everybody.
+Seven weeks spent in such close neighbourhood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>&mdash;a
+month of it under the same roof and in the same carriages&mdash;will
+fasten people together, and then travelling <i>shakes</i>
+them together. A more affectionate, generous woman
+never lived than Mrs. Jameson<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a> and it is pleasant to be
+sure that she loves us both from her heart, and not only
+<i>du bout des l&egrave;vres</i>. Think of her making Robert promise
+(as he has told me since) that in the case of my being
+unwell he would write to her instantly, and she would
+come at once if anywhere in Italy. So kind, so like her.
+She spends the winter in Rome, but an intermediate,
+month at Florence, and we are to keep tryst with her
+somewhere in the spring, perhaps at Venice. If not, she
+says that she will come back here, for that certainly she
+will see us. She would have stayed altogether perhaps,
+if it had not been for her book upon art which she is
+engaged to bring out next year, and the materials for
+which are to be <i>sought</i>. As to Pisa, she liked it just as we
+like it. Oh, it is so beautiful and so full of repose, yet not
+<i>desolate</i>: it is rather the repose of sleep than of death.
+Then after the first ten days of rain, which seemed to
+refer us fatally to Alfieri's 'piove e ripiove' came as
+perpetual a divine sunshine, such cloudless, exquisite
+weather that we ask whether it may not be June instead of
+November. Every day I am out walking while the golden
+oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired
+Robert and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards.
+We have been to your seashore, too, and seen your island,
+only he insists on it (Robert does) that it is not Corsica<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
+but Gorgona, and that Corsica is not in sight. <i>Beautiful</i>
+and blue the island was, however, in any case. It might
+have been Romero's instead of either. Also we have
+driven up to the foot of the mountains, and seen them
+reflected down in the little pure lake of Ascuno, and we
+have seen the pine woods, and met the camels laden with
+faggots all in a line. So now ask me again if I enjoy my
+liberty as you expect. My head goes round sometimes,
+that is all. I never was happy before in my life. Ah,
+but, of course, the painful thoughts recur! There are
+some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their
+displeasure, or even under their injustice. Only it seems
+to me that with time and patience my poor dearest papa
+will be melted into opening his arms to us&mdash;will be melted
+into a clear understanding of motives and intentions; I
+cannot believe that he will forget me, as he says he will,
+and go on thinking me to be dead rather than alive and
+happy. So I manage to hope for the best, and all that
+remains, all my life here, <i>is</i> best already, could not be
+better or happier. And willingly tell dear Mr. Martin I
+would take him and you for witnesses of it, and in the
+meanwhile he is not to send me tantalising messages;
+no, indeed, unless you really, really, should let yourselves
+be wafted our way, and could you do so much better at
+Pau? particularly if Fanny Hanford should come here.
+Will she really? The climate is described by the inhabitants
+as a 'pleasant spring throughout the winter,' and
+if you were to see Robert and me threading our path along
+the shady side everywhere to avoid the 'excessive heat
+of the sun' in this November (?) it would appear a good
+beginning. We are not in the warm orthodox position
+by the Arno because we heard with our ears one of the
+best physicians of the place advise against it. 'Better,'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+he said, 'to have cool rooms to live in and warm walks
+to go out along.' The rooms we have are rather over-cool
+perhaps; we are obliged to have a little fire in the
+sitting-room, in the mornings and evenings that is; but
+I do not fear for the winter, there is too much difference
+to my feelings between this November and any English
+November I ever knew. We have our dinner from the
+Trattoria at two o'clock, and can dine our favourite way
+on thrushes and Chianti with a miraculous cheapness, and
+no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet Elijah or
+the lilies of the field took as little thought for their dining,
+which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which
+we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee,
+and rolls of milk, made of milk, I mean, and at nine our
+supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chestnuts and
+grapes. So you see how primitive we are, and how I
+forget to praise the eggs at breakfast. The worst of Pisa
+is, or would be to some persons, that, socially speaking, it
+has its dullnesses; it is not lively like Florence, not in that
+way. But we do not want society, we shun it rather.
+We like the Duomo and the Campo Santo instead. Then
+we know a little of Professor Ferucci, who gives us access
+to the University library, and we subscribe to a modern
+one, and we have plenty of writing to do of our own. If
+we can do anything for Fanny Hanford, let us know. It
+would be too happy, I suppose, to have to do it for yourselves.
+Think, however, I am quite well, quite well. I
+can thank God, too, for being alive and well. Make dear
+Mr. Martin keep well, and not forget himself in the Herefordshire
+cold&mdash;draw him into the sun somewhere. Now
+write and tell me everything of your plans and of you
+both, dearest friends. My husband bids me say that he
+desires to have my friends for his own friends, and that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+he is grateful to you for not crossing that feeling. Let
+him send his regards to you. And let me be throughout
+all changes,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>Your ever faithful and most affectionate,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>BA.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> Anna Jameson (1794-1860) was a woman of letters and an
+art-critic at one time of immense influence through her illustrated
+books on "Sacred and Legendary" (as well as some other)
+"Art." But, as somehow or other happens not infrequently, the
+objects of her "affection and generosity" did not include her
+husband.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span></p>
+<h2>EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Not much need be added to what was said in the Introduction
+about this famous translator and almost equally,
+though less uniquely, remarkable letter-writer. His life
+was entirely uneventful and his friendships have been
+already commemorated. The version of Omar Khayy&agrave;m
+appeared in 1859; was an utter "drug"&mdash;remainder copies
+going at a few pence&mdash;for a time; but became one of the
+most admired books of the English nineteenth century
+before very long. Some of his <i>Letters</i> were published at
+various times from 1889 to 1901 (those to Fanny Kemble
+in 1895). It is not perhaps merely fanciful to suggest that
+the "uniqueness" above glanced at does supply a sort of
+connection between the <i>Letters</i> and the <i>Works</i>. The faculty
+of at once retaining the matter of a subject and transforming
+it in treatment has perhaps never, as regards translation,
+been exhibited in such transcendence as in the English
+<i>Rubaiy&agrave;t</i>. But something of this same faculty must belong
+to every good letter-writer&mdash;and a good deal of it certainly
+is shown by FitzGerald in <i>his</i> letters. Indeed one of the
+processes of letter-and memoir-study (the memoir as has
+been said is practically an "open" letter) is that of comparing
+the treatments of the same subject by different
+persons&mdash;say of the Great Fire by Pepys and Evelyn, of
+the Riots of '80 by Walpole and Johnson. He himself, as
+will be seen, calls the letter given below "not very interesting."
+It seems to me very interesting indeed: and
+likely to be increasingly so as time goes on. Few things
+could be more characteristic of the writer than his way of
+"visiting his sister" by living alone in lodgings all <i>day</i> for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+a month. The "<i>old</i> age"&mdash;forty-five&mdash;is hardly less so.
+The allusions to "Alfred" (Tennyson); "old" Thackeray,
+for whom he constantly keeps the affectionate school and
+college use of the adjective; Landor<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> (who unluckily did
+<i>not</i> die at Bath though he might have done so but for one
+of the last and least creditable of his eccentricities);
+Beckford ("Old Vathek"), and a fourth "old," Rogers
+(who was one of FitzGerald's aversions); Oxford (as yet
+almost unstained by any modernities spiritual or material);
+and Bath<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> (to remain still longer a "haunt of ancient
+peace")&mdash;are precious. The fifth "old," Spedding, who
+devoted chiefly to Bacon talents worthy of more varied
+exercise, was one of the innermost Tennyson set, as was
+"Harry" Lushington, who died very soon after this letter
+was written. "Your Book" is F. Tennyson's <i>Days and
+Hours</i>, a volume of poetry while reading which probably
+many people have wondered in what respect it came short
+of really great poetry, though they felt it did so.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>44. <span class="smcap">To Frederic Tennyson</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Bath</span> May 7/54.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Frederic,</p>
+
+<p>You see to what fashionable places I am
+reduced in my old Age. The truth is however
+I am come here by way of Visit to a sister I have scarce
+seen these six years; my visit consisting in this that I
+live alone in a lodging of my own by day, and spend two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+or three hours with her in the Evening. This has been
+my way of Life for three weeks, and will be so for some
+ten days more: after which I talk of flying back to more
+native counties. I was to have gone on to see Alfred in
+his "Island Home" from here: but it appears he goes
+to London about the same time I quit this place: so I
+must and shall defer my Visit to him. Perhaps I shall
+catch a sight of him in London; as also of old Thackeray
+who, Donne writes me word, came suddenly on him in
+Pall Mall the other day: while all the while people supposed
+<i>The Newcomes</i> were being indited at Rome or Naples.</p>
+
+<p>If ever you live in England you must live here at Bath.
+It really is a splendid City in a lovely, even a noble,
+Country. Did you ever see it? One beautiful feature
+in the place is the quantity of Garden and Orchard it is
+all through embroidered with. Then the Streets, when
+you go into them, are as handsome and gay as London,
+gayer and handsomer because cleaner and in a clearer
+Atmosphere; and if you want the Country you get into
+it (and a very fine Country) on all sides and directly. Then
+there is such Choice of Houses, Cheap as well as Dear, of
+all sizes, with good Markets, Railways etc. I am not sure
+I shall not come here for part of the Winter. It is a place
+you would like, I am sure: though I do not say but you
+are better in Florence. Then on the top of the hill is old
+Vathek's Tower, which he used to sit and read in daily,
+and from which he could see his own Fonthill, while it
+stood. Old Landor quoted to me 'Nullus in orbe locus,
+etc.,' apropos of Bath: he, you may know, has lived here
+for years, and I should think would die here, though not
+yet. He seems so strong that he may rival old Rogers;
+of whom indeed one Newspaper gave what is called an
+'Alarming Report of Mr. Rogers' Health' the other day,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
+but another contradicted it directly and indignantly, and
+declared the Venerable Poet never was better. Landor
+has some hundred and fifty Pictures; each of which he
+thinks the finest specimen of the finest Master, and has a
+long story about, how he got it, when, etc. I dare say
+some are very good: but also some very bad. He
+appeared to me to judge of them as he does of Books and
+Men; with a most uncompromising perversity which the
+Phrenologists must explain to us after his Death.</p>
+
+<p>By the bye, about your Book, which of course you wish
+me to say something about. Parker sent me down a
+copy 'from the Author' for which I hereby thank you.
+If you believe my word, you already know my Estimation
+of so much that is in it: you have already guessed that
+I should have made a different selection from the great
+Volume which is now in Tatters. As I differ in Taste
+from the world, however, quite as much as from you, I
+do not know but you have done very much better in
+choosing as you have; the few people I have seen are
+very much pleased with it, the Cowells at Oxford delighted.
+A Bookseller there sold all his Copies the first day they
+came down: and even in Bath a Bookseller (and not one
+of the Principal) told me a fortnight ago he had sold some
+twenty copies. I have not been in Town since it came
+out: and have now so little correspondence with literati
+I can't tell you about them. There was a very unfair
+Review in the <i>Athenaeum</i>; which is the only Literary
+Paper I see: but I am told there are laudatory ones in
+<i>Examiner</i> and <i>Spectator</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I was five weeks at Oxford, visiting the Cowells in just
+the same way that I am visiting my Sister here. I also
+liked Oxford greatly: but not so well I think as Bath:
+which is so large and busy that one is drowned in it as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
+much as in London. There are often concerts, etc., for
+those who like them; I only go to a shilling affair that
+comes off every Saturday at what they call the Pump
+Room. On these occasions there is sometimes some Good
+Music if not excellently played. Last Saturday I heard
+a fine Trio of Beethoven. Mendelssohn's things are
+mostly tiresome to me. I have brought my old Handel
+Book here and recreate myself now and then with pounding
+one of the old Giant's Overtures on my sister's Piano,
+as I used to do on that Spinnet at my Cottage. As to
+Operas, and Exeter Halls, I have almost done with them:
+they give me no pleasure, I scarce know why.</p>
+
+<p>I suppose there is no chance of your being over in
+England this year, and perhaps as little Chance of my
+being in Italy. All I can say is, the latter is not impossible,
+which I suppose I may equally say of the former. But
+pray write me. You can always direct to me at Donne's,
+12, St. James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield,
+Woodbridge. Either way the letter will soon reach me.
+Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear how you and yours
+are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some inundation
+of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so
+shortly and whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell
+you of Friends. I saw old Spedding in London; only
+doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved and
+whose deathbed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon.
+Harry Lushington wrote a martial Ode on seeing the
+Guards march over Waterloo Bridge towards the East:
+I did not see it, but it was much admired and handed
+about, I believe. And now my paper is out: and I am
+going through the rain (it is said to rain very much here)
+to my Sister's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg
+you, in reply to this long if not very interesting letter.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures,
+Books and Men" are very amusing; for they have been often
+repeated in regard to his own on all these subjects. In fact
+the two, though FitzGerald was not so childish as Landor, had
+much in common.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> The curious eulogy&mdash;preferring it to Oxford as being "large
+and busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London&mdash;is also
+very characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the
+country <i>and</i> in a large town&mdash;hardly in a small one.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+<h2>FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted
+lady little need be added. The two letters which follow,
+derived from <i>Further Records</i> (London, 1890), were written
+rather late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly
+coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> and
+her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story
+leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know
+the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a
+haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The
+"whiff of grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on
+the "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things
+on the subject that the present writer, in a long and wide
+experience, has come across.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">45. To H&mdash;&mdash; [extract]</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">York Farm, Branchtown</span>,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+<span class="smcap">Philadelphia</span>, Monday May 18th, 1874.</p>
+
+<p>One evening that my maid was sitting in the room
+from which she could see the whole of the staircase
+and upper landing, she saw the door of my
+bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown,
+with a bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>
+come out, walk the whole length of the passage, and
+return again into the bedroom, shutting the door after
+her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room
+below in my usual black velvet evening dress; moreover,
+the person she had seen bore no resemblance either in
+figure or face to me, or to any member of my household,
+which consisted of three young servant women besides
+herself, and a negro man-servant. My maid was a
+remarkably courageous and reasonable person, and,
+though very much startled (for she went directly upstairs
+and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and
+mentioned the circumstance to nobody, though, as she
+told me afterwards, she was so afraid lest I should have
+a similar visitation, that she was strongly tempted to ask
+Dr. W&mdash;&mdash;'s advice as to the propriety of mentioning her
+experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however,
+and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the
+same room, the man-servant came in to light the gas and
+made her start, observing which, he said, "Why, lors,
+Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a ghost." In
+spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied,
+"Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You
+don't believe in such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well,"
+he said, "I don't know just so sure what to say to that,
+seeing it's very well known there was a ghost in this
+house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well,
+poor Mrs. R&mdash;&mdash;'s ghost, it's very well known, walks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+about this house, and no great wonder either, seeing how
+miserably she lived and died here." To Ellen's persistent
+expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on,
+"Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (<i>i.e.</i>
+maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it";
+and there the conversation ended. Some days after this,
+Ellen coming into the drawing-room to speak to me,
+stopped abruptly at the door, and stood there, having
+suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to
+it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house,
+the face of the person she had seen come out of my bedroom.
+I think this a very tidy ghost story; and I am
+bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I have
+never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense
+of such intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without
+any assignable reason whatever, either in its situation
+or any of its conditions. My maid, to the present day,
+persists in every detail (and without the slightest variation)
+of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my explanation
+of it; that she had heard, without paying any
+particular attention to it, some talk among the other
+servants about the ghost in the house, which had remained
+unconsciously to her in her memory, and reproduced itself
+in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'><span class="smcap">46. To H&mdash;&mdash; [extract]</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">York Farm</span>, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.</p>
+
+<p>My dearest H&mdash;&mdash;,</p>
+
+<p>It is not possible for me to feel the slightest
+interest in the sort of literary feat which I
+consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to be.
+I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>&mdash;all
+Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars&mdash;and
+this absurd theory about Bacon, which was first
+broached a good many years ago, never obtained credit
+for a moment with them; nor did they ever entertain for
+an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William
+Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by
+him. Now I am intimately acquainted and in frequent
+communication with William Donne, Edward FitzGerald,
+and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare scholars,
+and the latter a man who has just published a work upon
+Bacon, which has been really the labour of his life; none
+of these men, competent judges of the matter, ever
+mentions the question of "Who wrote Shakespeare?"
+except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think
+they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so.</p>
+
+<p>I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made
+thus on the personality of my greatest mental benefactor;
+and consider the whole thing a misapplication, not to say
+waste, of time and ingenuity that might be better employed.
+As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with
+love, veneration, and gratitude, and am proud and happy
+to be his countrywoman, considering it among the
+privileges of my English birth, I resent the endeavour to
+prove that he deserved none of these feelings, but was a
+mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any
+interest for you, for I should not have supposed you
+imagined Shakespeare had not written his own plays,
+Irish though you be. Do you remember the servant's
+joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the
+cook asks, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the
+others answers, with, at any rate, partial plausibility,
+"Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure!"</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> Sometimes one thinks her the wisest woman who ever lived.
+"Nothing seems stranger than the delusions of other people
+<i>when they have ceased to be our own</i>" suggests La Rochefoucauld
+and comes near to Solomon; but whosoever may have anticipated
+or prompted her, he is not at the moment within my
+memory. But she is often not wise at all: and even her good
+wits are not always left unaffected by her bad temper. It is
+really amusing to read Mrs. Carlyle's rather mischievous account
+of Mrs. Butler (F. K.'s married name) calling and carrying a
+whip "to keep her hand in": and <i>then</i> to come on F. K.'s
+waspish resentment at these words, when they were published.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY<br />
+(1811-1863)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>So much has been said of Thackeray's letter-writing
+powers in the Introduction that not much need be added
+here on the general side. But a few words may be allowed
+on what we may call the <i>conditioning</i> circumstances which
+affected these powers, and made the result so peculiar.
+Except in Swift's case&mdash;a thing piquant in itself considering
+the injustice of the later writer to the earlier&mdash;hardly any
+body of letters exhibits these conditions so obviously and
+in so varied a fashion. In both there was the utmost
+intellectual satire combined with the utmost tenderness of
+feeling. Thackeray of course, partly from nature and partly
+from the influence of time, did not mask his tenderness
+and double-edge his severity with roughness and coarseness.
+But the combination was intrinsically not very different.
+There has also to be taken into account in Thackeray's
+case domestic sorrow&mdash;coming quickly and life-long after it
+began; means long restricted (partly by his own folly but
+not so more tolerable); recognition of genius almost as
+long deferred; and yet other "maladies of the soul." The
+result was a constant ferment, of which the letters are in a
+way the relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently
+light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when
+a man habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes
+lighter&mdash;till there is nothing of it left.</p>
+
+<p>He is, however, not easy to "sample," there being, as has
+been said, no authorised collection to draw upon and other
+difficulties in the way. What follows may serve for fault<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
+of a better: and the <i>Spectator</i> letter-pastiche referred to
+above under Walpole, will complete it perhaps more appropriately
+than may at first appear. For while the latter is
+quite Addisonian, not merely in dress but in body, its soul
+is blended of two natures&mdash;the model's and the artist's&mdash;in
+the rather uncanny fashion which makes <i>Esmond</i> as a
+whole so marvellous, except to those stalwarts who hold
+that, as nobody before the twentieth century knew anything
+about anything, Thackeray could not know about the
+eighteenth.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>47. <span class="smcap">To Miss Lucy Baxter</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">Washington</span>, Saturday<br />
+Feb. 19. 1853.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>My dear little kind Lucy:</p>
+
+<p>I began to write you a letter in the railroad
+yesterday, but it bumped with more than
+ordinary violence, and I was forced to give up the
+endeavour. I did not know how ill Lucy was at that time,
+only remembered that I owed her a letter for that pretty
+one you wrote me at Philadelphia, when Sarah was sick
+and you acted as her Secretary. Is there going to be
+always Somebody sick at the brown house? If I were
+to come there now, I wonder should I be allowed to come
+and see you in your night-cap&mdash;I wonder even do you
+wear a night-cap? I should step up, take your little
+hand, which I daresay is lying outside the coverlet, give
+it a little shake; and then sit down and talk all sorts
+of stuff and nonsense to you for half an hour; but very
+kind and gentle, not so as to make you laugh too much
+or your little back ache any more. Did I not tell
+you to leave off that beecely jimnayshum? I am always
+giving fine advice to girls in brown houses, and they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
+always keep on never minding. It is not difficult to write
+lying in bed&mdash;this is written not in bed, but on a sofa.
+If you write the upright hand it's quite easy; slanting-dicular
+is not so pleasant, though. I have just come back
+from Baltimore and find your mother's and sister's
+melancholy letters. I thought to myself, perhaps I might
+see them on this very sofa and pictured to myself their
+2 kind faces. Mr. Crampton was going to ask them to
+dinner, I had made arrangements to get Sarah nice
+partners at the ball&mdash;Why did dear little Lucy tumble
+down at the Gymnasium? Many a pretty plan in life
+tumbles down so, Miss Lucy, and falls on its back. But
+the good of being ill is to find how kind one's friends are;
+of being at a pinch (I do not know whether I may use the
+expression&mdash;whether "pinch" is an indelicate word in
+this country; it is used by our old writers to signify
+poverty, narrow circumstances, res angusta)&mdash;the good
+of being poor, I say, is to find friends to help you, I
+have been both ill and poor, and found, thank God, such
+consolation in those evils; and I daresay at this moment,
+now you are laid up, you are the person of the most
+importance in the whole house&mdash;Sarah is sliding about the
+room with cordials in her hands and eyes; Libby is sitting
+quite disconsolate by the bed (poor Libby! when one little
+bird fell off the perch, I wonder the other did not go up
+and fall off, too!) the expression of sympathy in Ben's eyes
+is perfectly heart-rending; even George is quiet; and your
+Father, Mother and Uncle (all 3 so notorious for their
+violence of temper and language) have actually forgotten
+to scold. "Ach, du lieber Himmel," says Herr Strumpf&mdash;isn't
+his name Herr Strumpf?&mdash;the German master, "die
+sch&ouml;ne Fr&auml;ulein ist krank!" and bursts into tears on the
+Pianofortyfier's shoulder when they hear the news (through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
+his sobs) from black John. We have an Ebony femme
+de chambre here; when I came from Baltimore just now
+I found her in the following costume and attitude standing
+for her picture to Mr. Crowe. She makes the beds with
+that pipe in her mouf and leaves it about in the rooms.
+Wouldn't she have been a nice lady's-maid for your
+mother and Miss Bally Saxter?</p>
+
+<p>But even if Miss Lucy had not had her fall, I daresay
+there would have been no party. Here is a great snow-storm
+falling, though yesterday was as bland and bright
+as May (English May, I mean) and how could we have
+lionized Baltimore, and gone to Mount Vernon, and taken
+our diversion in the snow? There would have been
+nothing for it but to stay in this little closet of a room,
+where there is scarce room for 6 people, and where it is
+not near so comfortable as the brown house. Dear old
+b.h., shall I see it again soon? I shall not go farther than
+Charleston, and Savannah probably, and then I hope I
+shall get another look at you all again before I commence
+farther wanderings&mdash;O, stop! I didn't tell you why I was
+going to write you&mdash;well, I went on Thursday to dine with
+Governor and Mrs. Fish, a dinner in honor of me&mdash;and
+before I went I arrayed myself in a certain white garment
+of which the collar-button-holes had been altered, and I
+thought of the kind, friendly little hand that had done
+that deed for me; and when the Fisheses told me how
+they lived in the Second Avenue (I had forgotten all about
+'em)&mdash;their house and the house opposite came back to my
+mind, and I liked them 50 times better for living near
+some friends of mine. She is a nice woman, Madam Fish,
+besides; and didn't I abuse you all to her? Good bye,
+dear little Lucy&mdash;I wish the paper wasn't full. But I
+have been sitting half an hour by the poor young lady's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+sofa, and talking stuff and nonsense, haven't I? And
+now I get up, and shake your hand with a God bless you!
+and walk down stairs, and please to give everybody my
+kindest regards, and remember that I am truly your
+friend.</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>W. M. T.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>48.</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">The "Trumpet" Coffee-house</span>,<br />
+<span class="smcap">Whitehall</span>.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>'Mr Spectator&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'I am a gentleman but little acquainted with
+the town, though I have had a university
+education, and passed some years serving my country
+abroad, where my name is better known than in the
+coffee-houses and St. James's.</p>
+
+<p>'Two years since my uncle died, leaving me a pretty
+estate in the county of Kent; and being at Tunbridge
+Wells last summer, after my mourning was over, and on
+the look-out, if truth must be told, for some young lady
+who would share with me the solitude of my great Kentish
+house, and be kind to my tenantry (for whom a woman
+can do a great deal more good than the best-intentioned
+man can), I was greatly fascinated by a young lady of
+London, who was the toast of all the company at the
+Wells. Everyone knows Saccharissa's beauty; and I
+think, Mr. Spectator, no one better than herself.</p>
+
+<p>'My table-book informs me that I danced no less than
+seven-and-twenty sets with her at the assembly. I treated
+her to the fiddles twice. I was admitted on several days
+to her lodging, and received by her with a great deal of
+distinction, and, for a time, was entirely her slave. It was
+only when I found, from common talk of the company at
+the Wells, and from narrowly watching one, who I once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
+thought of asking the most sacred question a man can
+put to a woman, that I became aware how unfit she was
+to be a country gentleman's wife; and that this fair
+creature was but a heartless worldly jilt, playing with
+affections that she never meant to return, and, indeed,
+incapable of returning them. 'Tis admiration such
+women want, not love that touches them; and I can
+conceive, in her old age, no more wretched creature than
+this lady will be, when her beauty hath deserted her,
+when her admirers have left her, and she hath neither
+friendship nor religion to console her.</p>
+
+<p>'Business calling me to London, I went to St. James's
+Church last Sunday, and there opposite me sat my beauty
+of the Wells. Her behaviour during the whole service
+was so pert, languishing and absurd; she flirted her fan,
+and ogled and eyed me in a manner so indecent, that I
+was obliged to shut my eyes, so as actually not to see her,
+and whenever I opened them beheld hers (and very bright
+they are) still staring at me. I fell in with her afterwards
+at Court, and at the playhouse; and here nothing would
+satisfy her but she must elbow through the crowd and
+speak to me, and invite me to the assembly, which she
+holds at her house, nor very far from Ch&mdash;r&mdash;ng Cr&mdash;ss.</p>
+
+<p>'Having made her a promise to attend, of course I kept
+my promise; and found the young widow in the midst
+of a half-dozen of card-tables, and a crowd of wits and
+admirers. I made the best bow I could, and advanced
+towards her; and saw by a peculiar puzzled look in her
+face, though she tried to hide her perplexity, that she had
+forgotten even my name.</p>
+
+<p>'Her talk, artful as it was, convinced me that I had
+guessed aright. She turned the conversation most
+ridiculously upon the spelling of names and words; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
+I replied with as ridiculous, fulsome compliments as I
+could pay her; indeed, one in which I compared her to an
+angel visiting the sick-wells, went a little too far; nor
+should I have employed it, but that the allusion came from
+the Second Lesson last Sunday, which we both had heard,
+and I was pressed to answer her.</p>
+
+<p>'Then she came to the question, which I knew was
+awaiting me, and asked how I <i>spelt</i> my name?
+"Madam," says I, turning on my heel, "I spell it with
+the y." And so I left her, wondering at the light-heartedness
+of the town-people, who forget and make friends so
+easily, and resolved to look elsewhere for a partner for
+your constant reader.</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>'<span class="smcap">Cymon Wyldoats</span>.</p>
+
+<p>'You know my real name, Mr. Spectator, in which there
+is no such a letter as <i>hupsilon</i>. But if the lady, whom I
+have called Saccharissa, wonders that I appear no more
+at the tea-tables, she is hereby respectfully informed the
+reason y.'</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There are few better examples by converse of the saying
+(familiar in various forms and sometimes specially applied
+to writing and answering letters) that it is only idle people
+who have no time to do anything, than Dickens. He was
+by no means long-lived: and for the last three-fifths&mdash;practically
+the whole busy time&mdash;of his life, he was one of
+the busiest of men. He wrote many universally known
+books, and not a few, in some cases not so well known,
+articles. He travelled a great deal; edited periodicals for
+many years, taking that duty by no means in the spirit
+of Olympian aloofness which some popular opinion connects
+with editorship; only sometimes shirked society; and had
+all sorts of miscellaneous occupations and avocations.
+His very fancy for long walks might seem one of the least
+compatible with letter-writing; yet a very large bulk of
+his letters (by no means mainly composed of editorial ones)
+has been published, and there are no doubt many unpublished.
+There have been different opinions as to their
+comparative rank as letters, but there can be no difference
+as to the curious full-bloodedness and plenitude of life
+which, in this as in all other divisions of his writing, characterises
+Dickens's expression of his thoughts and feelings.
+Perhaps, as might be generally though not universally
+expected, the comic ones are the more delightful: at any
+rate they seem best worth giving here. The first&mdash;to a
+schoolboy who had written to him about <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>&mdash;is
+quite charming; the second, to the famous actor-manager
+who after being a Londoner by birth and residence
+for half a century had just retired, is almost Charles Lamb-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>like;
+and the third deserved to have been put in the
+original mouth of Mrs. Gamp!<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>49. <span class="smcap">To Master Hastings Hughes</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">Doughty Street, London</span>.<br />
+Dec. 12th. 1838.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Respected Sir,</p>
+
+<p>I have given Squeers one cut on the neck and
+two on the head, at which he appeared much
+surprised and began to cry, which, being a cowardly thing,
+is just what I should have expected from him&mdash;wouldn't
+you?</p>
+
+<p>I have carefully done what you told me in your letter
+about the lamb and the two "sheeps" for the little boys.
+They have also had some good ale and porter, and some
+wine. I am sorry you didn't say <i>what</i> wine you would
+like them to have. I gave them some sherry, which they
+liked very much, except one boy, who was a little sick and
+choked a good deal. He was rather greedy, and that's
+the truth, and I believe it went the wrong way, which I
+say served him right, and I hope you will say so too.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholas had his roast lamb, as you said he was to, but
+he could not eat it all, and says if you do not mind his
+doing so he should like to have the rest hashed to-morrow
+with some greens, which he is very fond of, and so am I.
+He said he did not like to have his porter hot, for he
+thought it spoilt the flavour, so I let him have it cold. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+should have seen him drink it. I thought he never would
+have left off. I also gave him three pounds of money, all
+in sixpences, to make it seem more, and he said directly
+that he should give more than half to his mamma and
+sister, and divide the rest with poor Smike. And I say
+he is a good fellow for saying so; and if anybody says he
+isn't I am ready to fight him whenever they like&mdash;there!</p>
+
+<p>Fanny Squeers shall be attended to, depend upon it.
+Your drawing of her is very like, except that I don't
+think the hair is quite curly enough. The nose is
+particularly like hers, and so are the legs. She is a nasty
+disagreeable thing, and I know it will make her very cross
+when she sees it; and what I say is that I hope it may.
+You will say the same I know&mdash;at least I think you will.</p>
+
+<p>I meant to have written you a long letter, but I cannot
+write very fast when I like the person I am writing to,
+because that makes me think about them, and I like you,
+and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight o'clock at night,
+and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when it is
+my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not
+say anything more besides this&mdash;and that is my love to
+you and Neptune; and if you will drink my health every
+Christmas Day I will drink yours&mdash;come.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>I am,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Respected Sir,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Your affectionate Friend.</p>
+
+<p>P.S. I don't write my name very plain,<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> but you know
+what it is you know, so never mind.</p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>50. <span class="smcap">To Mr. W. C. Macready</span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Saturday, May 24th, 1851.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Macready,</p>
+
+<p>We are getting in a good heap of money for
+the Guild. The comedy has been very much
+improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene
+to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in
+the play. And there <i>is</i> a farce to be produced on Tuesday
+next, wherein a distinguished amateur will sustain a
+variety of assumption-parts, and in particular, Samuel
+Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am
+pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present.
+I lurk from the sun, during the best part of the day, in a
+villainous compound of darkness, canvas, sawdust, general
+dust, stale gas (involving a vague smell of pepper), and
+disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on
+Wednesday or Thursday.</p>
+
+<p>Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease,
+how little do you think of us among the London fleas!
+But they tell me you are coming in for Dorsetshire. You
+must be very careful, when you come to town to attend
+to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of
+people in the streets. They will misdirect you for what
+the vulgar call "a lark," meaning, in this connection, a
+jest at your expense. Always go into some respectable
+shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by
+his being dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons,
+and by the top of his hat being made of sticking-plaster.
+You may perhaps see in some odd place an intelligent-looking
+man, with a curious little wooden table before him
+and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+don't do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't
+buy at auctions where the best plated goods are being
+knocked down for next to nothing. These, too, are
+delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good
+acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy
+should be), I would recommend you to see &mdash;&mdash; at the
+Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Anybody will show it to
+you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it by
+seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab
+fares are eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is
+half a Dorsetshire mile, recollect. Porter is twopence per
+pint; what is called stout is fourpence. The Zoological
+Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the price of admission
+is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend
+you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street,
+Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these
+will please you after a time, though the tumult and bustle
+will at first bewilder you. If I can serve you in any way,
+pray command me. And with my best regards to your
+happy family, so remote from this Babel.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent'>Believe me, my dear Friend,</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Ever affectionately yours.</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>[<span class="smcap">Charles Dickens</span>]</p>
+
+<p>P.S. I forgot to mention just now that the black
+equestrian figure you will see at Charing Cross, as you go
+down to the House, is a statue of <i>King Charles the First</i>.<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>51. <span class="smcap">To Mr. Edmund Yates</span></p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>
+<span class="smcap">Tavistock House</span>,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. 1858.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>My dear Yates,</p>
+
+<p>Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong.
+The text <i>is not</i> "Which his 'owls was organs."
+When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to
+spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs.
+Harris's exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her
+first child (the Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he
+never took his hands away from his ears, or came out
+once, till he was showed the baby." On encountering that
+spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution) "took
+with fits." For this distressing complaint he was
+medically treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid
+him on his back upon the airy stones"&mdash;please to observe
+what follows&mdash;"and she was told, to ease her mind, his
+'owls was organs."</p>
+
+<p>That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed,
+in the first sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely
+covered with the counterpane, and not yet "put comfortable,"
+hears a noise apparently proceeding from the backyard,
+and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner:
+"What 'owls are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my
+ugebond?" Upon which the doctor, looking round one
+of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs. Harris's
+pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable
+presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?&mdash;no, no,
+no! What are we thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs.
+Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am, organs. Organs
+in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Yours faithfully, [C. D.]</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> One of the pleasantest, <i>to me</i>, of Dickens's letters is that in
+which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a
+contributor echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see <i>inf.</i>
+under Stevenson). But it is very short, and perhaps of no
+general interest.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable"
+(but by no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's <i>Not so Bad as we Seem</i>,
+acted by Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire
+House seventy years ago, and about to be reproduced <i>in loco</i> as
+these proofs are being revised.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There are some people who, while thinking that the
+author of <i>Westward Ho!</i> has not, at least recently, been
+given his due rank in critical estimation, admit certain
+explanations of this. As a historian and in almost all his
+writings Kingsley was inaccurate,&mdash;almost (as his friend
+and brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally
+inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went
+out of his way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people;
+he constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as
+philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat
+by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his contest
+with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one time
+he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more educated
+Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least unequal
+work, seem never to have attracted due notice.</p>
+
+<p>But none of his foibles&mdash;not even corn-treading&mdash;is a
+fatal defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he
+has good chance here, and his <i>Letters and Memoirs</i> have been
+deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot
+show in full the really exceptional versatility which enabled
+the same man to write <i>Yeast</i> and <i>Westward Ho!</i>, <i>Andromeda</i>
+and <i>The Water Babies</i>, the best of the Essays and the best
+of the Sermons, <i>Alton Locke</i> and <i>At Last</i>. But they can
+and they do show it in part: and it gives them the interest
+which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed in one
+respect&mdash;as a writer&mdash;Kingsley is perhaps better in his
+letters than in his <i>Essays</i>, where he too often affects a
+Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.
+The following specimen should show him in pleasantly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+varied character&mdash;as a thoroughly human person, a good
+sportsman, and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself
+very liberal of praise to his literary contemporaries) thought
+him&mdash;"the most generous man [he had] ever known; the
+most forward to praise, the most willing to admire, the
+most free from all thought of himself in praising and admiring
+and the most incapable of being made ill-natured
+by having to support ill-natured attacks upon himself."
+It is to be feared that Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when
+he declared, "Among men of letters I know nothing so
+rare as this."</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the author of <i>Tom Brown's Schooldays</i> was
+an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other things
+a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous to
+others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman were
+almost fresh, he writes that he has read <i>The Dream of Gerontius</i>
+"with admiration and awe." <span class='greek' title='thymos'>&#952;&#965;&#956;&#8057;&#962;</span>, in this sense = "spirit."
+"Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on the other
+side we get, through him of <i>As You Like It</i>, an explanation
+of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a cheerful-looking
+fish. Even two whom the present writer once saw
+tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow, did
+it sulkily.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>52. <span class="smcap">To Tom Hughes, Esq</span>.</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>Jan. 12. 1857.</p>
+
+<p>I have often been minded to write to you about
+'Tom Brown.' I have puffed it everywhere I
+went, but I soon found how true the adage is that
+good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already,
+and from every one, from the fine lady on her throne to
+the red-coat on his cock-horse and the school-boy on his
+forrum (as our Irish brethren call it), I have heard but one
+word, and that is, that it is the jolliest book they ever
+read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my
+boyhood, I should have been a better man now!' and
+more than one capped his sentiment frankly. Now
+isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such
+a book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour
+to take it in? So far from finding men of our rank in a
+bad vein, or sighing over the times and prospects of the
+rising generation, I can't help thinking they are very
+teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know
+what's right, and if they don't go and do it, still think
+the worst of themselves therefor. I remark now, that
+with hounds and in fast company, I never hear an oath,
+and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint. Moreover,
+drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I
+have good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class
+below. They are effeminate, and that makes them
+sensual. Pietists of all ages (George Fox, my dear friend,
+among the worst) never made a greater mistake than in
+fancying that by keeping down manly <span class='greek' title='thymos'>&#952;&#965;&#956;&#8057;&#962;</span>, which
+Plato saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down
+sensuality. They were dear good old fools. However,
+the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and 'Tom Brown' is a
+heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after
+that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am
+trying to polish the poems: but Maurice's holidays make
+me idle; he has come home healthier and jollier than ever
+he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy. Sell your
+last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size
+(Farlow his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike,
+&amp;c., on it the other day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment
+and delight of &mdash;&mdash;, who cut small jokes on 'a spoon
+at each end,' &amp;c., but altered his tone when he saw the
+melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span>
+would try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike
+round with it. I tried it in Lord Eversley's lakes on
+Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even his fly.
+Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven
+pounder at Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday
+with Garth's, the first run I've seen this year. Out of the
+Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as good as could be,
+fields three acres each, fences awful, then over Hazeley
+Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and
+a streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky
+earth. Time fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started
+thirty, and came in eight, and didn't the old mare go?
+Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank broke into
+a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before
+I'd time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if
+you can get a horse through that clay vale, why then you
+can get him 'mostwards'; leastwise so I find, for a
+black region it is, and if you ain't in the same field with
+the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same
+parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all
+supernumerary vegetations. Actually I was pounded in
+a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the amount of green stuff in
+these parts. Come and see me, and take the old mare out,
+and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+<h2>JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The peculiar wilfulness&mdash;the unkind called it wrong-headedness&mdash;which
+flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's genius,
+had, owing to his wealth and to his entire indifference to
+any but his own opinion, opportunities of displaying itself
+in all his work, public as well as private, which are not
+common. Naturally, it showed itself nowhere more than
+in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he often adopted
+the epistolary form in books which, had he chosen, might
+as well have taken another&mdash;while he might have chosen
+this in some which do not actually <i>call</i> themselves "letters."
+There is, however, little difference, except "fuller dress"
+of expression, between any of the classes of his work, whether
+it range from the first volume of <i>Modern Painters</i> to <i>Verona</i>
+in time, or from <i>The Seven Lamps of Architecture</i> to <i>Unto
+This Last</i> in subject. If anybody ever could "write
+beautifully about a broomstick" he could: though perhaps
+it is a pity that he so often did. But this faculty, and the
+entire absence of bashfulness which accompanied it, are no
+doubt grand accommodations for letter-writing; and the
+reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets the benefit of both very
+often&mdash;of a curious study of high character and great
+powers uncontrolled by logical self-criticism almost always.
+The following&mdash;part of a still longer letter which he addressed
+to the <i>Daily Telegraph</i>, Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant
+Question&mdash;was of course written for publication, but so,
+practically, was everything that ever came from its author.
+It so happens too that, putting aside his usual King Charles's
+Head of Demand and Supply, there is little in it of his more
+mischievous crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+occasionally to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes
+indulged, but much of his nobler idealism, while it
+is a capital example of his less florid style. "Launce,"
+"Grumio" and "Old Adam" are of course Shakespeare's:
+"Fairservice" (of whom, tormenting and selfish as he was,
+Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought a little too harshly) and
+"Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity enough"&mdash;the unfortunate
+man had written, and the newspaper had printed, <i>hoc</i>
+instead of <i>hac</i>. "A book of Scripture," Colenso's work
+had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a baby-farmer
+of the day.</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>53. From "<span class="smcap">The Daily Telegraph</span>"</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'>September 18, 1865.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY.</p>
+
+<p class='center'>To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."</p>
+
+<p>Sir,</p>
+
+<p>I have been watching the domestic correspondence
+in your columns with much interest, and
+thought of offering you a short analysis of it when you
+saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two
+of my own experience, being somewhat conceited on the
+subject just now, because I have a gardener who lets me
+keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse, understands
+that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees
+me gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a
+wry face. But your admirable article of yesterday causes
+me to abandon my purpose; the more willingly, because
+among all the letters you have hitherto published there is
+not one from any head of a household which contains a
+complaint worth notice. All the masters or mistresses
+whose letters are thoughtful or well written say they get<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
+on well enough with their servants; no part has yet been
+taken in the discussion by the heads of old families. The
+servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the
+better class of servants are also silent, and must remain so.
+Launce, Grumio, or Fairservice may have something to
+say for themselves; but you will hear nothing from Old
+Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from
+Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business
+for us; but his master and he are indeed "no more."
+I would have walked down to Dulwich to hear what Sam
+Weller had to say; but the high-level railway went
+through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is
+of no use writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he
+is no penman. And, indeed, Sir, little good will come of
+any writing on the matter. "The cat will mew, the dog
+will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is the
+greater part of what you have said, and to the point,
+speak but vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to
+the bottom." This is no sore that can be probed, no
+sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague spot. Small or
+great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth, that
+you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless,
+cancerous; a putrescence through the constitution of the
+people is indicated by this galled place. Because I know
+this thoroughly, I say so little, and that little, as your
+correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as
+you say, who might have known more of me, unpractically.
+Pardon me, I am no seller of plasters, nor of ounces of
+civet. The patient's sickness is his own fault, and only
+years of discipline will work it out of him. That is the
+only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.</p>
+
+<p>The relation of master and servant involves every other&mdash;touches
+every condition of moral health through the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
+State. Put that right, and you put all right; but you
+will find that it can only come ultimately, not primarily,
+right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence
+you have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial
+advice very good. You need hardly, I think, unless you
+wanted a type of British logic, have printed a letter in
+which the writer accused (or would have accused, if he
+had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of
+being thieves because he had known one robbery to have
+been committed by a nice-looking girl. But on the whole
+there is much common sense in the letters; the singular
+point in them all, to my mind, being the inapprehension
+of the breadth and connection of the question, and the
+general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the
+abstract ideas of sonship and slavery, which include whatever
+is possible in wise treatment of servants. It is very
+strange to see that, while everybody shrinks at abstract
+suggestions of there being possible error in a book of
+Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly
+rejects Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to
+her own, and that not one of your many correspondents
+seems ever to have read the Epistle to Philemon. It is
+no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary
+position hammer through their Horace at one time or
+other time of their school life, no word of his wit or his
+teaching seems to remain by them: for all the good they
+get out of them, the Satires need never have been written.
+The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of
+his domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even
+men of education would sometimes start to be reminded
+that his "<i>noctes coenaeque Deum!</i>" meant supping with
+his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow me,
+on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+your correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely
+upon it, the leader in the <i>Art-Journal</i> for July last? and
+to ask them also to meditate a little over the two beautiful
+epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted in the last
+paper of the <i>Idler</i>?</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and
+wretched in poverty; and beloved by the gods."</p>
+
+<p>"Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her
+body, has now found deliverance for that also."</p></div>
+
+<p>How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman,
+reverse this last legend, and write&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"This man, who while he lived was free only in his body,
+has now found captivity for that also."</p></div>
+
+<p>I will not pass without notice&mdash;for it bears also on wide
+interests&mdash;your correspondent's question, how my principles
+differ from the ordinary economist's view of supply
+and demand. Simply in that the economy I have taught,
+in opposition to the popular view, is the science which not
+merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and
+supply, but determines what <i>ought</i> to be demanded and
+what <i>can</i> be supplied. A child demands the moon, and,
+the supply not being in this case equal to the demand, is
+wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands
+your purse, and is supplied according to the less or more
+rational economy of the State, with that or a halter; a
+foolish nation, not able to get into its head that free trade
+does indeed mean the removal of taxation from its imports,
+but not of supervision from them, demands
+unlimited foreign beef, and is supplied with the cattle
+murrain and the like. There may be all manner of
+demands, all manner of supplies. The true political
+economist regulates these; the false political economist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
+leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine) Providence.
+For, indeed, the largest final demand anywhere reported
+of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by the broad
+gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at
+this day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or
+two who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in this business of servants everything depends on
+what sort of servant you at heart wish for or "demand."
+If for nurses you want Charlotte Winsors, they are to be
+had for money; but by no means for money, such as that
+German girl who, the other day, on her own scarce-floating
+fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another
+woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips.
+What kind of servant do you want? It is a momentous
+question for you yourself&mdash;for the nation itself. Are we
+to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only shop-boys:
+or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there
+to be knights among us, who will need squires&mdash;captains
+among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for
+your candlesticks, or silver plate? Myrmidons at your
+tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill? Are
+you resolved that you will never have any but your
+inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher
+with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your
+hearth, and be cherished there? It <i>might</i> come to that
+in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but if your
+servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they
+<i>are</i> so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered,
+and more useful than they. Determine what their education
+ought to be, and organize proper servants' schools,
+and there give it them. So they will be fit for their
+position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let the
+masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
+willing to stay in that. Remember that every people
+which gives itself to the pursuit of riches, invariably, and
+of necessity, gets the scum uppermost in time, and is set
+by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the Arabian
+Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing
+its shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a
+serious matter, if reversal be even possible, and it comes
+right end uppermost again, instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON<br />
+(1850-1894)</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The author of <i>Treasure Island</i> (invariably known to his
+friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved
+in the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable
+cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew
+Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that
+of our Matthew on Shelley. For a short time some of these
+friends&mdash;not perhaps the wisest of them&mdash;were inclined to
+regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer
+of criticisms and miscellaneous articles&mdash;a sort of new
+Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the <i>New Arabian Nights</i>
+than they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen
+for a long time&mdash;such as, in respect of anything imitable,
+had never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in
+with these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure
+Romance, and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar.
+On the other hand his letters are almost as good as his
+fiction, and not in the least open to the charges of a certain
+non-naturalness of style&mdash;even of thought&mdash;which could,
+justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it
+is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their
+popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other
+division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their
+"touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the
+blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference
+to its context) need not be discussed.</p>
+
+<p>As, by the kindness of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, I am enabled
+to give here an unpublished letter of Stevenson's to myself,
+it may require some explanation, not only of the com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>mentatory
+and commendatory kind but of fact. Stevenson,
+coming to dine with me, had brought with him, and showed
+with much pride, a new umbrella (a seven-and-sixpenny
+one) which, to my surprise, he had bought. But when he
+went away that night he forgot it; and when I met him
+next day at the Savile and suggested that I should send it
+to him, there or somewhere, he said he was going abroad
+almost immediately and begged me to keep it for him.
+By this or that accident, but chiefly owing to his constant
+expatriations, no opportunity of restitution ever occurred:
+though I used to remind him of it as a standing joke, and
+treasured it religiously, stored and unused. This letter
+is partly in answer to a last reminder in which I said that
+I was going to present it to the nation, that it might be kept
+with King Koffee Kalcalli's, but as a memory of a "victor
+in romance" not of a vanquished enemy.</p>
+
+<p>I of course told Mr. Kipling of the contents which concerned
+him: and he, equally of course, demanded delivery
+of the goods at once. But, half in joke, I demurred, saying
+that I was a bailee, and the gift was not formal enough,
+being undated and only a "suggestion"; he should have
+it without fail at my death, or Stevenson's.<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a></p>
+
+<p>When alas! this latter came, I prepared to act up to my
+promise; but, alas! again, the umbrella had vanished!
+Some prated of mislaying in house-removal, of illicit use
+by servants, etc.; but for my part I had and have no doubt
+that the thing had been enskyed and constellated&mdash;like
+Ariadne's Crown, Berenice's Locks, Cassiopeia's Chair,
+and a whole galaxy of other now celestial objects&mdash;to afford
+a special place to my dead friend then, and to my live one
+when (may the time still be far distant) he is ready for it.</p>
+
+<p>As for the more serious subject of the letter, I must refer
+curious readers to an essay of mine on Lockhart, originally
+published in 1884 and reprinted in <i>Essays in English</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
+<i>Literature</i> some years later. To this reprint I subjoined,
+<i>before</i> I got this letter from R. L. S., a reasoned defence of
+Lockhart from the charge of cowardice and "caddishness":
+but it is evident that Stevenson had not yet seen it. When
+he did see it, he wrote me another letter chiefly about my
+book itself, and so of no interest to the public, but touching
+again on this Lockhart question. He avowed himself still
+dissatisfied: but said he was sorry for his original remark
+which was "ungracious and unhandsome" if not untrue,
+adding, "for to whom do I owe more pleasure than to
+Lockhart?"</p></div>
+
+
+<p class='lheading'>54.</p>
+
+<p>My dear Saintsbury,</p>
+
+<p>Thanks for yours. Why did I call Lockhart
+a cad? That calls for an answer, and I give
+it. "Scorpion"<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a> literature seems at the best no very fit
+employment for a man of genius, which Lockhart was&mdash;and
+none at all for a gentleman. But if a man goes in for
+such a trade, he must be ready for the consequences; and
+I do not conceive a gentleman as a coward; the white
+feather is not his crest, it <i>almost</i> excludes&mdash;and I put the
+"almost" with reluctance. Well, now about the duel?
+Even Bel-Ami<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> turned up on the <i>terrain</i>. But Lockhart?
+<i>Et responsum est ab omnibus, Non est inventus.</i><a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a>
+I have often wondered how Scott took that episode.<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+do not know how this view will strike you;<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> it seems to
+me the "good old honest" fashion of our fathers, though
+I own it does not agree with the New Morality. "Cad"
+may be perhaps an expression too vivacious and not well
+chosen; it is, at least upon my view, substantially just.</p>
+
+<p>Now if you mean to comb my wig, comb it from the
+right parting&mdash;I know you will comb it well.</p>
+
+<p>An infinitely small jest occurs to me in connection with
+the historic umbrella: and perhaps its infinite smallness
+attracts me. Would you mind handing it to Rudyard
+Kipling with the enclosed note?<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> It seems to me fitly
+to consecrate and commemorate this most absurd episode.</p>
+
+<p class='lindent2'>Yours very sincerely,</p>
+
+<p class='rindent'><span class="smcap">Robert Louis Stevenson</span>.</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Enclosure</i>]</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+This Umbrella<br />
+purchased in the year 1878 by<br />
+Robert Louis Stevenson<br />
+(and faithfully stabled for more than twelve years in the<br />
+halls of George Saintsbury)<br />
+is now handed on at the suggestion of the first and<br />
+by the loyal hands of the second,<br />
+to<br />
+Rudyard Kipling.</p>
+
+<p class='frontend2'>
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.<br />
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> Of this <i>moratorium</i> I believe I duly advised R. L. S. and
+I don't think he objected. There was, if I remember rightly, a
+further reason for it&mdash;that I was living in two places at the
+time and the subject was not immediately at hand.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Lockhart's (self-given) name in the "<i>Chaldee MS.</i>" was
+"the Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> Maupassant's ineffable hero and title-giver.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> Hardly any school-boy of my or Stevenson's generation
+would have needed a reference to the <i>Essay on Murder</i>. But I
+am told that De Quincey has gone out of fashion, with school-boys
+and others.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> We know now: also what "The Duke" said when consulted.
+They did not agree with Stevenson, but then they knew all the
+facts and he did not.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> I should have held it myself, if the facts had been what R. L. S.
+thought them.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> Which of course is Mr. Kipling's property, not mine. But
+he has most kindly joined in, authorising its publication, and
+that of the rest of the letter as far as he is concerned.</p></div></div>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</h3>
+
+<h1>The Peace<br />
+of the Augustans</h1>
+
+<h2>A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature<br />
+as a Place of Rest and Refreshment</h2>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"No one living," according to the <i>Times</i>, "knows English
+eighteenth century literature as well as Mr. Saintsbury knows
+it.... If you do not know and like your eighteenth century,
+then he will make you; and if you do, he will show you that
+even what you thought the dullest parts are full of rest and
+refreshment."</p>
+
+<p>In the opinion of the <i>Spectator</i>, "Mr. Saintsbury in his new
+book has given to the world a singularly delightful gift. <i>The
+Peace of the Augustans</i> is in no sense written down. Yet every
+page is so subtly seasoned with amusing comment, and the
+whole book is so charmingly garnished that none but a dullard
+could fail to find delight in its perusal, however little he knew
+of the spirit which animated the eighteenth century. One can
+hardly imagine better reading after a day of hard or uncongenial
+work."</p>
+
+<p>"No bush is necessary to proclaim where good wine may be
+had," says the <i>Glasgow Herald</i>, "and no author's name was
+required to indicate the source of this always fresh and in some
+respects original treatment of the Augustan literature.... In
+literature there are many mansions, and Mr. Saintsbury is at
+home in them all.... A book it has been very pleasant and
+very profitable to read."</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+<p class='frontend'>
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.<br />
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2</p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>Handbooks of<br />
+English Literature</h1>
+
+
+<h3>Edited by the late J. W. HALES, M.A.<br />
+<span class='frontend2'>Professor of English Literature, King's College, London</span></h3>
+
+<p class='center'><i>Small Crown 8vo. 5s. net each</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>THE AGE OF ALFRED</b> (664-1154). By <span class="smcap">F. J. Snell, M.A.</span></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF CHAUCER</b> (1346-1400). By <span class="smcap">F. J. Snell, M.A.</span>,
+with an Introduction by <span class="smcap">Professor Hales</span>. <i>Third edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF TRANSITION</b> (1400-1580). By <span class="smcap">F. J. Snell,
+M.A.</span> In 2 vols. With Introduction by <span class="smcap">Professor Hales</span>,
+Vol. I.&mdash;Poetry. Vol. II.&mdash;Prose and Drama. <i>Third
+edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE</b> (1579-1631). By <span class="smcap">Thomas
+Seccombe</span> and <span class="smcap">J. W. Allen</span>. In 2 vols. Vol. I.&mdash;Poetry
+and Prose, with an Introduction by <span class="smcap">Professor Hales</span>.
+Vol. II.&mdash;Drama. <i>Seventh edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF MILTON</b> (1632-1660). By Rev. Canon <span class="smcap">J. H. B.
+Masterman, M.A.</span>, with an Introduction, &amp;c., by <span class="smcap">J. Bass
+Mullinger, M.A.</span> <i>Eighth edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF DRYDEN</b> (1660-1700). By the late <span class="smcap">Richard
+Garnett, C.B., LL.D.</span> <i>Eighth edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF POPE</b> (1700-1744). By <span class="smcap">John Dennis</span>. <i>Tenth
+edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF JOHNSON</b> (1744-1798). By <span class="smcap">Thomas Seccombe</span>.
+<i>Seventh edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH</b> (1798-1832). By <span class="smcap">Professor
+C. H. Herford</span>, Litt.D. <i>Twelfth edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>THE AGE OF TENNYSON</b> (1830-1870). By <span class="smcap">Professor Hugh
+Walker, M.A.</span> <i>Ninth edition.</i></p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+
+<p class='frontend'>
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.<br />
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2</p>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<a name="transnote" id="transnote"></a><h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_108">108</a>: full stop inserted after "Duke of Burgundy"</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_125">125</a>: Second opening parenthesis from before "Cambridge
+University Press" removed</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_245">245</a>: Removed closing parenthesis following "the Valley
+of the Shadow of Frederick"</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_260">260</a>: "sunday" <i>sic</i></p>
+
+<p>Generally spelling, capitalization and punctuation in
+letters has been retained as per the book, with the
+following exceptions:</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_305">305</a>: Removed closing quote marks following "terrain"
+(Letter 54)</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Letter Book
+       Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing
+
+Author: George Saintsbury
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2010 [EBook #31072]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LETTER BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Susan Skinner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note                                         |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in        |
+  | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of   |
+  | this document.                                             |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Text printed using the Greek alphabet in the original book |
+  | is shown as follows: [Greek: logos].                       |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Superscript text in the original book is shown as follows: |
+  | w^ch                                                       |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER BOOK
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER BOOK
+
+SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
+ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF
+LETTER-WRITING
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+
+LONDON
+G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE AND CO.
+1922
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When my publishers were good enough to propose that I should undertake
+this book, they were also good enough to suggest that the Introduction
+should be of a character somewhat different from that of a
+school-anthology, and should attempt to deal with the Art of
+Letter-writing, and the nature of the Letter, as such. I formed a plan
+accordingly, by which the letters, and their separate Prefatory Notes,
+might be as it were illustrations to the Introduction, which was
+intended in turn to be a guide to them. Having done this with a proper
+_Pourvu que Dieu lui prete vie_ referring to both book and author, I
+thought it well to look up next what had been done in the way before me,
+at least to the extent of what the London Library could provide me in
+circumstances of enforced abstinence from the Museum and from "Bodley."
+From its catalogue I selected a curious eighteenth-century _Art of
+Letter Writing_, and four nineteenth and earliest twentieth century
+books--Roberts's _History of Letter Writing_ (1843) with Pickering's
+ever-beloved title-page and his beautiful clear print; the _Litterature
+Epistolaire_ of Barbey d'Aurevilly--a critic never to be neglected
+though always to be consulted with eyes wide open and brain alert;
+finally, two Essays in Dr. Jessopp's _Studies by a Recluse_ and in the
+_Men and Letters_ of Mr. Herbert Paul, once a very frequent associate of
+mine. The title of the first mentioned book speaks it pretty
+thoroughly. "The Art of Letter Writing: Divided into Two Parts. The
+First: Containing Rules and Directions for writing letters on all sorts
+of subjects [_this line as well as several others is Rubricked_] with a
+variety of examples equally elegant and instructive. The Second: a
+Collection of Letters on the Most interesting occasions of life in which
+are inserted--The proper method of Addressing Persons of all ranks; some
+necessary orthographical directions, the right forms of message for
+cards; and thoughts upon a multiplicity of subjects; the whole composed
+upon an entirely new plan--chiefly calculated for the instruction of
+youth, but may be [_sic_] of singular service to Gentlemen, Ladies and
+all others who are desirous to attain the true style and manner of a
+polite epistolary intercourse." May our own little book have no worse
+fortune! Mr. Roberts's avowedly restricts itself to the fifth century as
+a _terminus ad quem_, though it professes to start "from the earliest
+times," and its seven hundred pages deal very honestly and fully with
+their subjects. The essays of Dr. Jessopp and Mr. Paul are of course
+merely Essays, of a score or two of pages: though the first is pretty
+wide in its scope. There would be nothing but good to be said of either,
+if both had not been, not perhaps blasphemous but parsimonious of
+praise, towards "Our Lady of the Rocks." It cannot be too often or too
+solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sevigne as a
+letter-writer is not crotchet or fashion or affectation--is no result of
+merely taking authority on trust. The more one reads her, and the more
+one reads others, the more convinced should one be of her absolute
+non-pareility in almost every kind of genuine letter (as apart from
+letters that are really pamphlets or speeches or sermons) except pure
+love-letters, of which we have none from her. As for _Litterature
+Epistolaire_, it is a collection of some two dozen reviews of various
+modern reprints of letters by distinguished writers--mostly but not all
+French. The author has throughout used the letters he is considering
+almost wholly as tell-tales of character, not as examples of art: and
+therefore he does not, except in possible glances, require further
+attention, though the book is full of interesting things. Its judgment
+of one of our greatest, and one of the greatest of all,
+letter-writers--Horace Walpole--is too severe, but not, like Macaulay's,
+superficially insistent on superficial defects, and ought not to be
+neglected by anyone who studies the subject.
+
+If, however, there was no need to rely on any of these books, they did
+nothing to hinder in the peculiar way in which I had feared some
+hindrance. For it is a nuisance to find that somebody else has done
+something in the precise way in which you have planned doing it. I have
+not yet encountered that nuisance here. Dr. Jessopp's general plan is
+most like mine--indeed some similarity was unavoidable: but the two are
+not identical, and I had planned mine before I knew anything about his.
+
+So with this prelude let us go to business, only premising further that
+the object, unlike that of the anonymous Augustan, is not to "give rules
+and instructions for writing good letters," except in the way (which far
+excels all rules and instructions) of showing how good letters have been
+written. Let us also modestly trust that the collection may deal with
+some "interesting occasions of life" and contain "thoughts on a [fair]
+multiplicity of subjects." Having been, as above observed, unable during
+the composition of this book to visit London or Oxford, I have had to
+rely occasionally on friendly assistance. I owe particular thanks (as
+indeed I have owed them at almost any time these forty years) to the
+Rev. William Hunt, D.Litt., Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford:
+and I am also indebted to Miss Elsie Hitchcock for some kind aid at the
+Museum given me through the intermediation of Professor Ker.
+
+Besides the thanks given to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, Mr. Kipling and Dr.
+Williamson in the text in reference to certain new or almost new
+letters, we owe very sincere gratitude for permission to reprint the
+following important matters:
+
+     _His Honour Judge Parry._ Two letters from "Letters from
+     Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple."
+
+     _Messrs. Douglas & Foulis._ A letter to Joanna Baillie, from
+     "Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott."
+
+     _Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co._ Two letters from Mrs.
+     Carlyle's "Letters and Memorials," and one letter from Sir
+     G. O. Trevelyan's "Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay."
+
+     _Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._ Three letters from "The
+     Letters of Charles Dickens"; one letter by FitzGerald and
+     one by Thomas Carlyle, from "Letters and Literary Remains of
+     Edward FitzGerald"; one letter from "Charles Kingsley: his
+     Letters and Memories of his Life"; and two extracts from
+     "Further Records, 1848-1883," by Frances Anne Kemble.
+
+     _Mr. John Murray._ One letter from "The Letters of Elizabeth
+     Barrett Browning."
+
+GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
+
+1 ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH,
+_October, 1921_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                          PAGE
+
+PREFACE                                                      v
+
+
+INTRODUCTION ON THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER-WRITING        1
+
+    I. Ancient History. II. Letters in English--before
+    1700. III. The Eighteenth Century. IV. Nineteenth
+    Century Letters--Early. V. Nineteenth
+    Century Letters--Later. VI. Some Special Kinds
+    of Letter. VII. Conclusion.
+
+
+APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION:
+
+    GREEK LETTERS--SYNESIUS                                100
+
+        (i)  To his Brother--Preparations to meet Raiders.
+        (ii) To Hypatia--Longing but unable to come
+             to her.
+
+    LATIN LETTERS--PLINY                                   102
+
+        Accepts a Brief for a Lady.
+
+    LETTERS OF THE "DARK" AGES--SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS       105
+
+        The exploits of Ecdicius.
+
+    EARLY MEDIAEVAL (TWELFTH CENTURY) LETTER               108
+
+        Duchess of Burgundy to King Louis VII.--Matchmaking.
+
+ENGLISH LETTERS
+
+THE "PASTON" LETTERS                                       111
+
+    1. A Channel Fight.
+    2. Margery is Willing.
+
+ROGER ASCHAM                                               116
+
+    3. "Up the Rhine."
+    4. Nostalgia for Cambridge.
+
+LADY MARY SIDNEY                                           122
+
+    5. Have you no room at Court?
+
+GEORGE CLIFFORD, EARL OF CUMBERLAND                        125
+
+    6. A Death-bed letter.
+
+JOHN DONNE                                                 129
+
+    7-10. Letters to Magdalen Lady Herbert.
+
+JAMES HOWELL                                               135
+
+    11. "Long Melford for Ever."
+    12. The White Bird.
+
+JOHN EVELYN                                                139
+
+    13. How to take care of ears, eyes and brains.
+
+DOROTHY OSBORNE                                            146
+
+    14. A discourse of Flying, and several other things.
+    15. Some testimonies of kindness.
+
+JONATHAN SWIFT                                             154
+
+    16. Letter-hunger.
+
+LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU                                  159
+
+    17. Directions for running away with her.
+
+PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF CHESTERFIELD               164
+
+    18. Some manners that make a gentleman.
+
+GEORGE BALLARD                                             173
+
+    19. The wickedness of Reviewers.
+
+THOMAS GRAY                                                180
+
+    20. Romanities and Plain English.
+    21. Kent, Rousseau, Lord Chatham, etc.
+
+HORACE WALPOLE (AND W. M. THACKERAY)                       187
+
+    22. What Horace wrote.
+    23. What Horace might have written.
+
+TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT                                     195
+
+    24. Of Johnson, and Johnson's Frank--To Wilkes.
+
+WILLIAM COWPER                                             197
+
+    25. About a Greenhouse.
+
+SYDNEY SMITH                                               201
+
+    26. Vegetation, stagnation, and assassination.
+    27. His "hotel." Hasty judgments deprecated.
+
+SIR WALTER SCOTT                                           206
+
+    28. Authors and Morals.
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE                                    212
+
+    29. From Spinosa to Go_b_win through things in general.
+
+ROBERT SOUTHEY                                             217
+
+    30-33. The _Lingo Grande_.
+
+CHARLES LAMB                                               221
+
+    34. A Sigh for Solitude.
+
+GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON                                  228
+
+    35. Of Pictures, and Sepulture, and his Daughters.
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY                                       233
+
+    36. Of Pictures only.
+
+JOHN KEATS                                                 239
+
+    37. A Voyage, and the _Quarterly_ and Charmian.
+
+THE CARLYLES                                               244
+
+    38. Thomas on _Latrappism_.
+    39. Jane Welsh on her Travels.
+    40. Jane Welsh on the blessings of Photography.
+
+THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY                                  253
+
+    41. Outfits, and Election Dinners. Miss Berry and
+          Lady Holland.
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES                                      258
+
+    42. Stage-coach tricks, and stage-play ghosts.
+
+ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING                                 263
+
+    43. An extended Honey-moon.
+
+EDWARD FITZGERALD                                          270
+
+    44. Of Bath, and Oxford, and some Immortals.
+
+FRANCIS ANNE KEMBLE                                        275
+
+    45. A Ghost in Flannel.
+    46. Bakespearism.
+
+WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY                                279
+
+    47. As himself.
+    48. In character.
+
+CHARLES DICKENS                                            286
+
+    49. Straight dealing with the personages of _Nicholas
+          Nickleby_.
+    50. Advice to an Innocent in London.
+    51. Mr. and Mrs. Harris.
+
+CHARLES KINGSLEY                                           292
+
+    52. _Tom Brown's Schooldays_; Pike fishing; and a
+          pretty thing with Garth's.
+
+JOHN RUSKIN                                                296
+
+    53. The Servant question.
+
+ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON                             303
+
+    54. John Gibson Lockhart, and an Umbrella.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE HISTORY AND ART OF LETTER
+WRITING
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ANCIENT HISTORY
+
+
+On letter-writing, as on most things that can themselves be written and
+talked about, there are current many _cliches_--stock and banal sayings
+that express, or have at some time expressed, a certain amount of truth.
+The most familiar of these for a good many years past has been that the
+penny post has killed it. Whether revival of the twopenny has caused it
+to exhibit any kind of corresponding resurrectionary symptoms is a
+matter which cannot yet be pronounced upon. But it may be possible to
+avoid these _cliches_, or at any rate to make no more than necessary
+glances at them, in composing this little paper, which aims at being a
+discussion of the Letter as a branch of Literature, no less than an
+introduction to the specimens of the kind which follow.
+
+If, according to a famous dictum, "Everything has been said," it follows
+that every definition must have been already made. Therefore, no doubt,
+somebody has, or many bodies have, before now defined or at least
+described the Letter as that kind of communication of thought or fact to
+another person which most immediately succeeds the oral, and supplies
+the claims of absence. You want to tell somebody something; but he or
+she is not, as they used to say "by," or perhaps there are circumstances
+(and circum_standers_) which or who make speech undesirable; so you
+"write." At first no doubt, you used signs or symbols like the feather
+with which Wildrake let Cromwell's advent be known in _Woodstock_--a
+most ingenious device for which, by the way, the recipients were scantly
+grateful. But when reading and writing came by nature, you availed
+yourself of these Nature's gifts, not always, it is to be feared,
+regarding the interconnection of the two sufficiently. There is probably
+more than one person living who has received a reply beginning "Dear
+So-and-So, Thanks for your interesting and _partially legible_ epistle,"
+or words to that effect. But that is a part of the matter which lies
+outside our range.
+
+On the probable general fact, however, some observations may be less
+frivolously based. If this were a sentimental age, as some ages in the
+past have been, one might assume that, as the first portrait is supposed
+to have been a silhouette of the present beloved, drawn on her shadow
+with a charcoaled stick, so the same, or another implement may have
+served (on what substitute for paper anybody pleases) to communicate
+with her when absent. But the silliness of this age--though far be it
+from us to dispute its possession of so prevailing a quality--does not
+take the form--at least _this_ form--of sentiment.
+
+[Sidenote: THE BEGINNINGS]
+
+There is, moreover, nothing silly or sentimental, though of course there
+is something that may be controverted, in saying that except for purely
+"business" purposes (which are as such alien from Art and have nothing
+to do with any but a part, and a rather sophisticated part, of Nature)
+the less the letter-writer forgets that he is merely substituting pen
+for tongue the better. Of course, the instruments and the circumstances
+being different, the methods and canons of the proceedings will be
+different too. In the letter there is no interlocutor; and there is no
+possibility of what we may call accompanying it with personal
+illustrations[1] and demonstrations, if necessary or agreeable. But
+still it may be laid down, with some confidence, that the more the
+spoken word is heard in a letter the better, and the less that word is
+heard--the more it gives way to "book"-talk--the worse. Indeed this is
+not likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almost infinite
+possibilities of differences in personal opinion as to what constitutes
+the desirable mixture of variation and similarity between a conversation
+and a letter. Let us, before discussing this or saying anything more
+about the principles, say something about the history of this, at best
+so delightful, at worst so undelightful art. For if History, in the
+transferred sense of particular books called "histories," is rather apt
+to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense will ever
+lead us to truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The Present is
+turning to Past even as we are trying to know it. Only the Past itself
+abides our knowledge.
+
+[Sidenote: BIBLICAL EXAMPLES]
+
+Of the oldest existing examples of epistolary correspondence, except
+those contained in the Bible, the present writer knows little or
+nothing. For, except a vanished smattering of Hebrew, he "has" no
+Oriental tongue; he has never been much addicted to reading
+translations, and even if he had been so has had little occasion to draw
+him to such studies, and much to draw him away from them. There
+certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens of the more passionate
+letter writing in ancient if not exactly pre-Christian Chinese, and
+probably in other tongues--but it is ill talking of what one does not
+know. In the Scriptures themselves letters do not come early, and the
+"token" period probably lasted long. Isaac does not even send a token
+with Jacob to validate his suit for a daughter of Laban. But one would
+have enjoyed a letter from Ishmael to his half-brother, when his
+daughter was married to Esau, who was so much more like a son of Ishmael
+himself than of the amiable husband of Rebekah. She, by the way, had
+herself been fetched in an equally unlettered transaction. It would of
+course be impossible, and might be regarded as improper, to devote much
+space here to the sacred epistolographers. But one may wonder whether
+many people have appreciated the humour of the two epistles of the great
+King Ahasuerus-Artaxerxes, the first commanding and the second
+countermanding the massacre of the Jews--epistles contained in the
+Septuagint "Rest of the Book of Esther" (see our Apocrypha), instead of
+the mere dry summaries which had sufficed for "the Hebrew and the
+Chaldee." The exact authenticity of these fuller texts is a matter of no
+importance, but their substance, whether it was the work of a Persian
+civil servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever
+it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and
+such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in
+the first letter of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was
+approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity" with "the
+wicked wretch Aman--a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and
+cunning"--the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the
+respective key-notes--is worthy of any one of the best ironists from
+Aristophanes to the late Mr. Traill.
+
+Between these two extremes of the Pentateuch and the Apocrypha there is,
+as has been remarked by divers commentators, not much about letters in
+the Bible. It is not auspicious that among the exceptions come David's
+letter commanding the betrayal of Uriah, and a little later Jezebel's
+similar prescription for the judicial murder of Naboth. There is,
+however, some hint of that curious attractiveness which some have seen
+in "the King's daughter all glorious within--" and without (as the
+Higher Criticism interprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland way with
+which she herself stipulates that the false witnesses shall be "sons of
+Belial."
+
+There is a book (once much utilised as a school prize) entitled _The
+History of Inventions_. I do not know whether there is a "Dictionary of
+Attributed Inventors." If there were it would contain some queer
+examples. One of the queerest is fathered (for we only have it at second
+hand) on Hellanicus, a Greek writer of respectable antiquity--the
+Peloponnesian war-time--and respectable repute for book-making in
+history, chronology, etc. It attributes the invention of letters--_i.e._
+"epistolary correspondence"--to Atossa--not Mr. Matthew Arnold's Persian
+cat but--the Persian Queen, daughter of Cyrus, wife of Cambyses and
+Darius, mother of Xerxes, and in more than her queenly status a sister
+to Jezebel. Atossa had not a wholly amiable reputation, but she was
+assuredly no fool: and if, to borrow a famous phrase, it had been
+necessary to invent letters, there is no known reason why she might not
+have done it. But it is perfectly certain that she did not, and no one
+who combines, as all true scholars should endeavour to combine, an
+unquenchable curiosity to know what can be known and is worth knowing
+with a placid resignation to ignorance of what cannot be known and would
+not be worth knowing--need in the least regret the fact that we do not
+know who did.
+
+There are said to be Egyptian letters of immense antiquity and high
+development; but once more, I do not profess direct knowledge of them,
+and once more I hold that of what a man does not possess direct
+knowledge, of that he should not write. Besides, for practical purposes,
+all our literature begins with Greek: so to Greek let us turn. We have a
+fair bulk of letters in that language. Hercher's _Epistolographi Graeci_
+is a big volume, and would not be a small one, if you cut out the Latin
+translations. But it is unfortunate that nearly the whole, like the
+majority of later Greek literature, is the work of that special class
+called rhetoricians--a class for which, though our term "book-makers"
+may be a little too derogatory, "men of letters" is rarely (it is
+sometimes) applicable, as we use it when we mean to be complimentary.
+These letters are still close to "speech," thus meeting in a fashion our
+initial requirement, but they are close to the speech of the
+"orator"--of the sophisticated speaker to the public--not to that of
+genuine conversation. In fact in some cases it would require only the
+very slightest change to make those exercitations of the rhetors which
+are not called "epistles" definite letters in form, while some of the
+best known and characteristic of their works are so entitled.
+
+[Sidenote: THE RHETORICIANS]
+
+It was unfortunate for the Greeks, as it would seem, and for us more
+certainly, that letter-writing was so much affected by these
+"rhetoricians." This curious class of persons has perhaps been too much
+abused: and there is no doubt that very great writers came out of
+them--to mention one only in each division--Lucian among the extremely
+profane, and St. Augustine among the greatest and most intellectual of
+divines. But though their habitual defects are to be found abundantly
+enough in modern society, these defects are, with us, as a rule
+distributed among different classes; while anciently they were united in
+this one. We have our journalists, our book-makers (literary, not
+sporting), our platform and parliamentary palaverers, our popular
+entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and
+collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician
+of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined
+the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one
+division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above
+all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification
+and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. In particular he
+had a mania in his more serious moods for defining and sub-defining
+things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub-definitions.
+Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who (or a false namesake of his)
+has left us a capital _general_ remark (to be given presently) on
+letter-writing, elaborately divides its kinds, with prescriptions for
+writing each, into "friendly," "commendatory," "reproving,"
+"objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing,"
+"threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory," "persuasive," "begging,"
+"questioning," "answering," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing,"
+"defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the
+neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has attributed
+to him, a list of nearly double the length, including most of those
+given above and adding many. Of these last, "love-letters" is the most
+important, and "mixed" the _canniest_, for it practically lets in
+everything.
+
+This way, of course, except for purely business purposes--where
+established forms save time, trouble and possible litigation--no
+possible good lies; and indeed the impossibility thereof is clearly
+enough indicated in the above-glanced-at general remark of Demetrius (or
+whoever it was) himself. In fact the principle of this remark and its
+context in the work called "Of Interpretation," which it is more usual
+now to call, perhaps a little rashly, "Of Style," is so different from
+the catalogue of types that they can hardly come from the same author.
+"You _can_ from this, as well as from all other kinds of writing,
+discern the character of the writer; indeed from none other can you
+discern it so well." Those who know a little of the history of Criticism
+will see how this anticipates the most famous and best definitions of
+Style itself, as being "the very man," and they may perhaps also think
+worthy of notice another passage in the same context where the author
+finds fault with a rather "fine" piece of an epistle as "not the way a
+man would talk to his friend," and even goes on to use the most familiar
+Greek word for talking--[Greek: lalein]--in the same connection.
+
+[Sidenote: ALCIPHRON. JULIAN]
+
+Of such "talking with a friend" we have unfortunately very few
+examples--hardly any at all--from older Greek. The greater
+collections--not much used in schools or colleges now but well enough
+known to those who really know Greek Literature--of Alciphron,
+Aristaenetus, Philostratus and (once most famous of all) Phalaris
+are--one must not perhaps say obvious, since men of no little worth were
+once taken in by them but--pretty easily discoverable counterfeits. They
+are sometimes, more particularly those of Philostratus, interesting and
+even beautiful;[2] they have been again sometimes at least supposed,
+particularly those of Alciphron, to give us, from the fact that they
+were largely based upon lost comedies, etc., information which we should
+otherwise lack; and in many instances (Aristaenetus is perhaps here the
+chief) they must have helped towards that late Greek creation of the
+Romance to which we owe so much. Nor have we here much if anything to do
+with such questions as the morality of personating dead authors, or that
+of laying traps for historians. It is enough that they do not give us,
+except very rarely, good letters: and that even these exceptions are not
+in any probability _real_ letters, real written "confabulations of
+friends" at all. Almost the first we have deserving such a description
+are those of the Emperor Julian in the fourth century of that Christ for
+whom he had such an unfortunate hatred; the most copious and thoroughly
+genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a little later. Of these
+Julian's are a good deal affected by the influence of Rhetoric, of which
+he was a great cultivator: and the peculiar later Platonism of Synesius
+fills a larger proportion of his than some frivolous persons might
+wish. Julian is even thought to have "written for publication," as Latin
+epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless
+it is pleasant to read the Apostate when he is not talking Imperial or
+anti-Christian "shop," but writing to his tutor, the famous sophist and
+rhetorician Libanius, about his travels and his books and what not, in a
+fashion by no means very unlike that in which a young Oxford graduate
+might write to an undonnish don. It is still pleasanter to find Synesius
+telling his friends about the very thin wine and very thick honey of
+Cyrenaica; making love ("camouflaged," as they say to-day, under
+philosophy) to Hypatia, and condescending to mention dogs, horses and
+hunting now and then. But it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk
+of this department of Greek literature is spurious to begin with, and
+uninteresting, even if spuriousness be permitted to pass. The Letters of
+Phalaris--once famous in themselves, again so as furnishing one of the
+chief battle-grounds in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel, and never to
+be forgotten because of their connection with Swift's _Battle of the
+Books_--are as dull as ditchwater in matter, and utterly destitute of
+literary distinction in style.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: ROMAN LETTER-WRITING]
+
+It is a rule, general and almost universal, that every branch of Latin
+literature is founded on, and more or less directly imitative of Greek.
+Even the Satire, which the Romans relied upon to prove that they could
+originate, is more apparently than really an invention. Also, though
+this may be more disputable, because much more a matter of personal
+taste, there were very few such branches in which the pupils equalled,
+much fewer in which they surpassed, their masters. But in both respects
+letter-writing may be said to be an exception. Unless we have been
+singularly unlucky in losing better Greek letters than we have, and
+extraordinarily fortunate in Fate's selection of the Latin letters that
+have come down to us, the Romans, though they were eager students of
+Rhetoric, and almost outwent their teachers in composing the empty
+things called Declamations, seem to have allowed this very practice to
+drain off mere verbosity, and to have written letters about matters
+which were worth pen, ink, paper and (as we should say) postage. We have
+in Greek absolutely no such letters from the flourishing time of the
+literature as those of Cicero, of Pliny[3] and even of Seneca--while as
+we approach the "Dark" Ages Julian and Synesius in the older language
+cannot touch Sidonius Apollinaris or perhaps Cassiodorus[4] in the
+younger. Of course all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine, while
+the Greek letters attributed to Plato, Socrates and other great men are
+almost without doubt and without exception spurious. But there is very
+little likelihood that the Greeks of the great times wrote many
+"matter-ful" letters at all. They lived in small communities, where they
+saw each other daily and almost hourly; they took little interest in the
+affairs of other communities unless they were at war with them, and
+when they did travel there were very few means of international
+communication.
+
+Women write the best letters, and get the best letters written to them:
+but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class
+and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima,[5] ever
+wrote at all. The Romans, after their early period, were not merely a
+larger and ever larger community full of the most various business, and
+constantly extending their presence and their sway; but, by their unique
+faculty of organisation, they put every part of their huge world in
+communication with every other part. Here also we lack women's letters;
+but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly off for those of men.
+There have even been some audacious heretics who have preferred Cicero's
+letters to his speeches and treatises; Seneca, the least attractive of
+those before mentioned, put well what the poet Wordsworth called in his
+own poems "extremely va_loo_able thoughts"; one of the keenest of
+mathematicians and best of academic and general business men known to
+the present writer, the late Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a
+special favourite of Pliny; and if people can find nothing worse to say
+against Sidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and not in what was
+for his time archaic, Latin, his case will not look bad in the eyes of
+sensible men.
+
+[Sidenote: SIDONIUS]
+
+Sidonius, like Synesius, was a Christian, and, though the observation
+may seem no more logical than Fluellen's about Macedon and Monmouth,
+besides being in more doubtful taste, there would seem to be some
+connection between the spread of Christianity and that of
+letter-writing. At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps because
+of the deficiency of formal literature during the "Dark" Ages. It is not
+really futile to point out that a very large part of the New Testament
+consists of "Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these epistles
+is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter. Even that which is so,
+often if not always, partakes of the character of a "live" letter to an
+extent which makes the so-called letters of the Greek Rhetoricians mere
+school exercises. And St. Paul's allusions to his journeys, his
+salutations, his acknowledgment of presents, his reference to the cloak
+and the books with its anxious "but especially the parchments," and his
+excellent advice to Timothy about beverages, are all the purest and most
+genuine matter for mail-bags. So is St. Peter's very gentleman-like (as
+it has been termed) retort to his brother Apostle; and so are both the
+Second and the Third of St. John. Indeed it is not fanciful to suggest
+that the account of the voyage which finishes the "Acts," and other
+parts of that very delightful book, are narratives much more of the kind
+one finds in letters than of the formally historical sort.
+
+However this may be, it is worth pointing out that the distrust of other
+pagan kinds of literature which the Fathers manifested so strongly, and
+which was inherited from them by the clergy of the "Dark," and to some
+extent the Middle Ages, clearly could not extend to the practice of the
+Apostles. If from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it
+must be remembered that from them we have little literature at all:
+while from the close of that period and the beginning of the next we
+have one of the most famous of all correspondences, the Letters of
+Abelard and Heloise. Of the intrinsic merit of these long-and far-famed
+compositions, as displaying character, there have been different
+opinions--one of the most damaging attacks on them may be found in
+Barbey d'Aurevilly's already mentioned book. But their influence has
+been lasting and enormous: and even if it were to turn out that they are
+forgeries, they are certainly early forgeries, and the person who forged
+them knew extremely well what he was about. There is no room here to
+survey, even in selection, the letter-crop of the Middle Ages; and from
+henceforward we must speak mainly, if not wholly (for some glances
+abroad may be permitted), of _English_ letters.[6] But the
+ever-increasing bonds of union--even of such union in disunion as
+war--between different European nations, and the developments of more
+complex civilisation, of more general education and the like--all tended
+and wrought in the same direction.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+LETTERS IN ENGLISH--BEFORE 1700
+
+
+Exceptions have sometimes been taken to the earliest collection of
+genuine private letters, not official communications written in or
+inspired by Latin--which we possess in English. "The Paston Letters"
+have been, from opposite sides, accused of want of literary form and of
+not giving us interesting enough details in substance. The objections in
+either case[7] are untenable, and in both rather silly. In the first
+place "literary form" in the fifteenth century was exceedingly likely to
+be bad literary form, and we are much better off without it. Unless Sir
+Thomas Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John
+Fortescue had occupied there something like the position of Mr.
+Tulkinghorn in _Bleak House_, we should not have got much "literature"
+from any known prose-writer of the period. Nor was it wanted. As for
+interestingness of matter, the people who expect newspaper-correspondent
+fine writing about the Wars of the Roses may be disappointed; but some
+of us who have had experience of that dialect from the Russells of the
+Crimea through the Forbeses of 1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon the
+other day will probably not be very unhappy. The Paston Letters are
+simply genuine family correspondence--of a genuineness all the more
+certain because of their commonplaceness. It is impossible to conceive
+anything further from the initial type of the Greek rhetorical "letter"
+of which we have just been saying something. They are not, to any but an
+excessively "high-browed" and high-flying person, uninteresting: but the
+chief point about them is their solidity and their satisfaction, in
+their own straightforward unvarnished way, of the test we started with.
+When Margaret Paston and the rest write, it is because they have
+something to say to somebody who cannot be actually spoken to. And that
+something is said.
+
+[Sidenote: ASCHAM]
+
+The next body of letters--Ascham's--which seems to call for notice here
+is of the next century. It has not a few points of appeal, more than one
+of which concern us very nearly. Most of the writers of the Paston
+Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and fairly educated,
+persons entirely unacademic in character, and their society was that of
+the last trouble and convulsion through which the Early Middle Ages
+struggled into the Renaissance, so long delayed with us. Ascham was one
+of our chief representatives of the Renaissance itself--that is to say,
+of a type at once scholarly and man-of-the-worldly, a courtier and a
+diplomatist as well as a "don" and a man of letters; a sportsman as well
+as a schoolmaster. And while from all these points of view his letters
+have interest, there is one thing about them which is perhaps more
+interesting to us than any other: and that is the fact that while he
+begins to write in Latin--the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of
+the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not
+definitely scholarly, throughout Europe--he exchanges this for English
+latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of
+reasons for writing the _Toxophilus_ in our own and his own tongue.
+There is indeed a double attraction, which has not been always or often
+noticed, in this change of practice. Everybody has seen how important it
+is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary
+scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the
+bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the
+continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not
+entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. But
+perhaps everybody has not seen how by implication it acknowledges the
+peculiar character of the genuine letter--that, though it may be a work
+of art, it should not be one of artifice--that it is a matter of
+"business _or_ bosoms," not of study or display.
+
+Contemporary with these letters of Ascham, and going on to the end of
+the century and the closely coincident end of the reign of Elizabeth, we
+have a considerable bulk of letter-writing of more or less varied kinds.
+The greatest men of letters of the time--to the disgust of one, but not
+wholly so to that of another, class of "scholar"--give us little.
+Spenser is the most considerable exception: and his correspondence with
+Gabriel Harvey, though it is personal to a certain extent and on
+Gabriel's side sufficiently character-revealing, is really of the hybrid
+kind, partaking rather more of pamphlet or essay than of letter proper.
+Indeed a good part of that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this
+time, which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of
+attention, takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from
+genuine letter-writing than the correspondence of "Immerito" and
+"Master G. H." We have of course more of Harvey's; we have laments from
+others, such as Lyly and Googe, about their disappointments as
+courtiers; we have a good deal of State correspondence. There are some,
+not very many, agreeable letters of strictly private character in whole
+or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of Sir Philip
+Sydney's mother, Lady Mary Dudley. Others are from time to time being
+made public, such as those in Dr. Williamson's recent book on the
+Admiral-Earl of Cumberland. As far as mere bulk goes, Elizabethan
+epistolography would take no small place, just as it would claim no mean
+one in point of interest. But in an even greater degree than its
+successor (_v. inf._) this _corpus_ would expose itself to the criticism
+that the time for perfect letter-writing was not quite yet, in this day
+of so much that was perfect, that the style was not quite the right
+style, the knack not yet quite achieved. And if the present writer--who
+swore fealty to Elizabethan literature a full third of a century ago
+after informal allegiance for nearly as long a time earlier--admits some
+truth in this, there probably is some. The letters included in it
+attract us more for the matter they contain than for the manner in which
+they contain it: and when this is the case no branch of literature has
+perfected itself in art.
+
+[Sidenote: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]
+
+The position of the seventeenth century in England with regard to
+letter-writing has been the subject of rather different opinions. The
+bulk of its contributions is of course very considerable: and some of
+the groups are of prominent importance, the most singular, if not the
+most excellent, being Cromwell's, again to be mentioned. As in other
+cases and departments this century offers a curious "split" between its
+earlier part which declines--not in goodness but like human life in
+vitality--from, but still preserves the character of, the pure
+Elizabethan, and its later, which grows up again--not in goodness but
+simply in the same vitality--towards the Augustan. This relationship is
+sufficiently illustrated in the actual letters. The great political
+importance of the Civil War of course reflects itself in them. Indeed it
+may almost be said that for some time letters are wholly concerned with
+such things, though of course there are partial exceptions, such as
+those of Dorothy Osborne--"mild Dorothea" as she afterwards became,
+though there is no mere mildness of the contemptuous meaning in her
+correspondence. In most remarkable contrast to these stand the somewhat
+earlier letters of James Howell--our first examples perhaps of letters
+"written for publication" in the fullest sense, very agreeably varied in
+subject and great favourites with a good many people, notably
+Thackeray--but only in part (if at all) genuine private correspondence.
+
+Not a few men otherwise distinguished in literature wrote
+letters--sometimes in curious contrast with other productions of theirs.
+The most remarkable instance of this, but an instance easily
+comprehensible, is that of Samuel Pepys. Only a part of Pepys' immense
+correspondence has ever been printed, but there is no reason to expect
+from the remainder--whether actually extant, mislaid or lost--anything
+better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the
+most part the very opposite in every respect of the famous and
+delectable Diary. They are perfectly "proper," and for the most part
+extremely dull; while propriety is certainly not the most salient
+characteristic of the Diary; and the diarist manages, in the most
+eccentric manner, to communicate interest not merely to things more
+specially regarded as "interesting," but to his accounts and his
+ailments, his business and his political history. His contemporary and
+rather patronising friend Evelyn keeps his performances less far apart
+from each other: but is certainly, though a representative, not a great
+letter-writer, and the few that we have of Pepys' patronised
+fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden are of no great mark, though not superfluous.
+In the earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken off its
+control as the epistolary language; and it was not till quite the other
+end that English itself became supple and docile enough for the purposes
+of the letter-writer proper. It was excellent for such things as formal
+Dedications, semi-historical narratives, and the like. And it could, as
+in Sir Thomas Browne's, supply another contrast, much more pleasing than
+that referred to above, of domestic familiarity with a most poetical
+transcendence of style in published work. Yet, as was the case with the
+novel, the letter, to gain perfection, still wanted something easier
+than the grand style of the seventeenth century and more polished than
+its familiar style.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]
+
+But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in respect of
+letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance,
+hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in
+the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent
+of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European
+literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence--French
+and English--the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters:
+and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most
+famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and
+Cowper--belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"--our most famous
+she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield,
+whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men
+just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more
+remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
+itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the
+letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this
+time is not really more important than the abundance, variety and
+popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
+of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the
+"letterwritingest" of ages from almost every point of view. In its least
+as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if not into
+poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on classical
+models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more
+modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_, started the
+fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of
+print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's
+good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like
+Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian
+times, if then. At the present moment one does not remember an exact
+equivalent in England to the story of two good writers in French if not
+French writers[8] living in the same house, meeting constantly during
+the day, yet exchanging letters, and not short ones, before breakfast.
+But very likely there is or was one, and more than one.
+
+For those no doubt estimable persons who are not content with facts but
+must have some explanations of them, it is less difficult to supply such
+things than is sometimes the case. One--the attainment at last of a
+"middle" style neither grand nor vulgar--has already been glanced at. It
+has been often and quite truly observed that there are sentences,
+passages, paragraphs, almost whole letters in Horace Walpole and Lady
+Mary Wortley Montagu, in Fanny Burney and in Cowper, which no one would
+think old-fashioned at the present day in any context where modern slang
+did not suggest itself as natural. But this was by no means the only
+predisposing cause, though perhaps most of the others were, in this way
+or that, connected with it. Both in France and in England literature
+and social matters generally were in something like what political
+economists call "the stationary state" till (as rather frequently
+happens with such apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed
+to the Niagara of the French Revolution, and the rapids of the
+quarter-century War. There were no great poets:[9] and even
+verse-writers were rarely grand: but there was a greater diffusion of
+competent writing faculty than had been seen before or perhaps--for all
+the time, talk, trouble, and money spent on "education,"--has been
+since. New divisions and departments of interest were accumulating--not
+merely in Literature itself[10] (as to which, if people's ideas were
+rather limited, they _had_ ideas), but in the arts which were in some
+cases practised almost for the first time and in all taken more
+seriously, in foreign and home politics, commerce, manufactures, all
+manner of things. People were by no means so apt to stay in the same
+place as they had been: and when friends were in different places they
+had much easier means of communicating with each other. Nor should it be
+forgotten that the more elaborate system of ceremonial manners which
+then prevailed, but which has been at first gradually, and latterly with
+a run, breaking down for the last hundred years, had an important
+influence on letter-writing. One does not of course refer merely to
+elaborate formulas of beginning and ending--such as make even the
+greatest praisers of times past among us smile a little when they find
+Dr. Johnson addressing his own step-daughter as "Dear Madam," and being
+her "most humble servant" though in the course of the letter he may use
+the most affectionate and intimate expressions. But the manners of
+yester-year made it obligatory to make your letters--unless they were
+merely what were called "cards" of invitation, message, etc.--to some
+extent _substantive_. You gave the news of the day, if your
+correspondent was not likely to know it; the news of the place,
+especially if you were living in a University town or a Cathedral city.
+If you had read a book you very often criticised it: if you had been to
+any kind of entertainment you reported on it, etc. etc. Of course all
+this is still done by people who really do write real letters: but it is
+certainly done by a much smaller proportion of letter-writers than was
+the case two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago. The
+newspaper has probably done more to kill letters than any penny post,
+halfpenny postcard or even sixpenny telegram could do. Nor perhaps have
+we yet mentioned the most powerful destructive agent of all, and that is
+the ever increasing want of leisure. The dulness of modern Jack, in
+letters as elsewhere, arises from the fact that when he is not at work
+he is too desperately set on playing to have time for anything else. The
+Augustans are not usually thought God-like: but they have this of Gods,
+that they "lived _easily_."
+
+There is perhaps still something to be said as to the apparently almost
+pre-established harmony between the eighteenth century and
+letter-writing. It concerns what has been called the "_Peace_ of the
+Augustans"; the at least comparative freedom alike from the turmoil of
+passion and the most riotous kinds of fun. Tragedy may be very fine in
+letters, as it may be anywhere: but it is in them the most
+dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of
+all motives--again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but
+it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in--not
+roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being
+excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne
+and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at
+any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the
+best of their letters. The person who is bored by any one of those sets
+which have been mentioned must bring the boredom with him--as, by the
+way, complainers of that state of suffering do much oftener than they
+wot of. Nor is much less to be said of scores of less famous epistolers
+of the time, from the generation of Berkeley and Byrom to that of Scott
+and Southey.
+
+[Sidenote: SWIFT]
+
+To begin with Swift, it is a scarcely disputable fact that opinions
+about this giant of English literature--not merely as to his personal
+character, though perhaps this has had more to do with the matter than
+appears on the surface, but as to his exact literary value--have
+differed almost incomprehensibly. Johnson thought, or at least
+affected to think, that _A Tale of a Tub_ could not be Swift's,
+because it was too good for him, and that "Tom Davies might have
+written _The Conduct of the Allies_": while on the other hand
+Thackeray, indulging in the most extravagant denunciation of Swift as
+a man, did the very fullest, though not in the least too full, homage
+to his genius. But one does not know many things more surprising in
+the long list of contradictory criticisms of man and genius alike,
+than Mr. Herbert Paul's disapproval of the _Journal to Stella_ as
+letters while admitting its excellence as "narrative."[12] To other
+judges these are some of the most perfect letters in existence, some
+of the most absolutely genuine and free from the slightest taint of
+writing for publication; some of the most extraordinarily blended of
+intense intimacy which is neither ridiculous nor productive of the
+shame-faced feeling that you ought not to have heard it; and full of
+that dealing with matters less intimate but still interesting to both
+correspondents which displays the "narrative" excellence conceded by
+this acute critic. It must of course be remembered that these
+"Journal-letters" are by no means Swift's only proofs of his
+epistolary expertness. The Vanessa ones perhaps display a little of
+the hopelessly enigmatic character which spreads like a mist over the
+whole of that ill-starred relationship: but they make all the more
+useful contrast to the "wholeheartedness"--one may even use that word
+in reference to the little bit of what we may call constructive
+deception as to "the other person"--of those to her rival.[13] Those
+to Pope (of which so shabby a use was made by their strangely
+constituted recipient), to Bolingbroke and others are among the best
+of friendly letters: and the curious batch to the Duchess of
+Queensberry might be classed with those "court-paying" letters of man
+to woman which are elsewhere more particularly noted. But the "Stella"
+or "Stella-cum-Dingley" division (if that most singular of
+value-completing zeros is to be brought in) is a thing by itself.
+Perhaps appreciating or not appreciating the "little language" is a
+matter very largely of personal constitution, and the failure to
+appreciate is (like colour-blindness or other physical deficiencies) a
+thing to be sorry for, not to condemn. But one might have thought that
+even if what we may call "feeling" of this were absent there would be
+an intellectual understanding of the way in which it completes the
+whole-heartedness just mentioned--the manner in which the writer deals
+with politics, society, letters, the common ways of life, and his own
+passion--this last sometimes in the fore-sometimes in the background,
+but never far off. Other letters, from Horace Walpole's downwards, may
+contain a panorama of life as brilliant as these give, or more
+brilliant. Yet it is too frequently a panorama or a puppet show, or at
+the best a marvellously acted but somewhat bloodless drama. On the
+other hand, the pure passion-letters lack as a rule this
+many-sidedness. With Swift we get both. Seldom has any collection
+shown us more varied interests. But through it all there is an
+anticipation of the knell of this commerce of his--"Only a woman's
+hair"--and that hair threads, in subtle fashion, the whole of the
+Journal, turning the panorama to something felt as well as seen, and
+the puppet-show to realities of flesh and blood.
+
+That this magical transforming element is wanting in a most remarkable
+pair of contemporaries, Chesterfield and "Lady Mary," has been generally
+allowed; though a strong fight has been made by some of her sisters for
+"my lady" and though the soundest criticism allows that "my lord" did
+not so much lack as dissemble heart and even sometimes showed the heart
+he had. It would be out of our proper line to discuss such questions
+here at any length. It may be enough to warn readers who have not yet
+had time to look into the matter for themselves that Pope's coarse
+attacks on Lady Mary and Johnson's fine rhetorical rebuff of
+Chesterfield were unquestionably outbursts of hurt personal pride.
+Horace Walpole made hits at both for reasons which we may call personal
+at second-hand, because the one was a friend of his sister-in-law and
+the other an enemy of his father. As for Dickens' caricature of "Sir
+John Chester" in _Barnaby Rudge_ it is not so much a caricature as a
+sheer and inexcusable libel. Anyhow, the letters of the Earl and the
+Lady are exceedingly good reading. Persons of no advanced years who have
+been introduced to them in the twentieth century have been known to find
+them positively captivating: and their attractions are, not merely as
+between the two but even in each case by itself, singularly various.
+Lady Mary's forte--perhaps in direct following of her great forerunner
+and part namesake, Marie de Sevigne, though she spoke inadvisedly of
+her--lies in description of places and manners, and in literary
+criticism.[14] Her accounts of her Turkish journey in earlier days, and
+of some scenes in Italy later, of her court and other experiences, etc.,
+rank among the best things of the kind in English; and her critical
+acuteness, assisted as it was by no small possession of what might
+almost be called scholarship, was most remarkable for her time. Also,
+she does all these things naturally--with that naturalness at
+which--when they possess it at all--women are so much better than men.
+People say a lady can never pass a glass without looking at herself.
+(One thinks by the way one has seen men do that.) But after all what the
+glass gives is a reflection and record of nature: and women learn to see
+it in others as well as in themselves.
+
+[Sidenote: CHESTERFIELD]
+
+Few English writers have suffered more injustice in popular estimation
+than Chesterfield. Even putting aside the abuse by which, as above
+mentioned, Johnson showed (on Fluellen's principles convincingly) that
+he had more in common with the Goddess Juno than the J in both their
+names--that is to say an _insanabile vulnus_ of vanity--there remain
+sources of mistakes and prejudice which have been all too freely tapped.
+The miscellaneous letters--which show sides of him quite different from
+those most in evidence throughout the "Letters to his Son"--are rarely
+read: these latter have been, at least once and probably oftener, made
+into a schoolbook for translation into other languages--an office by no
+means likely to conciliate affection. And even when they are not
+suspected of positive immorality there is a too general idea that they
+are frivolously and trivially didactic--the sort of thing that Mr.
+Turveydrop the elder might have written on Deportment--if he had had
+brains enough. Yet again, unbiassed appreciation of them has been
+hampered by all sorts of idle controversies as to the kind of man that
+young Stanhope actually turned out to be--a point of merely gossiping
+importance in any case, and, whatever be the facts of this one, having
+no more to do with the merit of the letters than the other fact that
+some people make mistakes in their accounts after having learnt the
+multiplication table has to do with the value of that composition. As a
+matter of relevant fact the letters--except (and even here the
+accusations against them are much exaggerated) from the point of view of
+very severe morality in regard to one or two points--perhaps no more
+than one--are full of sound advice, clear common-sense, and ripe
+experience of the world. The manners they recommend are not those of any
+but a very exceptional "dancing master," they are those of a gentleman.
+The temper that they inculcate and that they exhibit in the inculcator
+is positively kindly and relatively correct. Both these and the other
+batch of "Letters to his Godson" and successor in the Earldom (the Lord
+Chesterfield for forging whose name Dr. Dodd was hanged) show the most
+curious and unusual pains on the part of a man admitted to be in the
+highest degree a man of the world, and sometimes accused of being
+nothing else, to make himself intelligible and agreeable to young--at
+first very young--boys. In his letters to older folk, both men and
+women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise--the
+thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite
+different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15]
+worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real
+Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all
+these letters--though most attractively in those to his son--a power of
+literary expression which would have made the fortune of any
+professional writer of the time. If Chesterfield's literary taste was
+too often decided by the fashionable limitations of this time, it was,
+within those limitations, accomplished: and it was accompanied, as mere
+taste very often is not, by no small command of literary production. He
+could and did write admirable light verse; his wit in conversation is
+attested in the most final fashion by his enemy Horace Walpole, and some
+of the passages in the letters where he indulges in description or even
+dialogue are by no means unworthy of the best genteel comedy of the
+time. But he could also, as was said of someone else, be "nobly
+serious," as in his "character" writing and elsewhere. His few
+contributions to the half-developed periodical literature of his day
+show how valuable he would have been to the more advanced Review or
+Magazine of the nineteenth century: and if he had chosen to write
+Memoirs they would probably have been among the best in English.[16] Now
+the Memoir and the Letter are perhaps the most straitly and intimately
+connected forms of literature.
+
+[Sidenote: HORACE WALPOLE]
+
+Horace Walpole--like his two contemporaries, fellow-members of English
+aristocratic society, acquaintances and objects of aversion just
+discussed--has been the subject of very various opinions. Johnson (of
+whom he himself spoke with ignorant contempt and who did not know his
+letters, but did know some of his now half-forgotten published works)
+dismissed him with good-natured belittlement. Macaulay made him the
+subject of some of the most unfortunately exaggerated of those
+antitheses of blame and praise which, in the long run, have done the
+writer more harm than his subjects. To take one example less likely to
+be known to English readers, the wayward and prejudiced, but often very
+acute French critic already mentioned, Barbey d'Aurevilly, though he
+admits Horace's _esprit_ pronounces it _un fruit brillant, amer, et
+glace_. There are undoubtedly many things to be said against him as a
+man--if you take the "Letters-a-telltale-of-character" view, especially
+so. He was certainly spiteful, and he had the particularly
+awkward--though from one point of view not wholly unamiable--peculiarity
+of being what may be called spiteful at second hand. To stand up for
+your friends at the proper time and in the proper place is the duty, and
+should be the pleasure, of every gentleman. But to bite and for the most
+part, if not almost always, to _back_-bite your friends' supposed
+enemies--often when they have done nothing adverse to those friends on
+the particular occasion--is the act at the best of an intempestively
+officious person, at the worst of a cur. And Horace was always doing
+this in regard to all sorts of people--his abuse of Johnson himself, of
+Chesterfield and Lady Mary, of Fielding and others, having no personal
+excuse or reason whatsoever.
+
+His taste in collecting, building, etc., is not a matter in which men of
+other times should be too ready to throw stones, for taste in all such
+matters at almost all times, however sure a stronghold it may seem to
+those who occupy it, is the most brittle of glass-houses to others. He
+had also a considerable touch of almost original genius in important
+kinds of literature, as _The Mysterious Mother_ and _The Castle of
+Otranto_ showed--a touch which undoubtedly helped him in his letters.
+But of critical power he had nothing at all; and his knowledge (save,
+perhaps in Art) was anything but extensive and still less accurate.
+Politically he was a mere baby, all the eighty years of his life; though
+he passed many of them in the House of Commons and might have passed
+several in the House of Lords, had he chosen to attend it. When he was
+young he was a theoretical republican rejoicing in the execution of
+Charles I.: when he was old the French Revolution was to him anathema
+and he was horrified at the execution of Louis XVI. He was incapable of
+sustaining, perhaps of understanding, an argument: everything with him
+was a matter, as the defamers of women say it is with them, of personal
+and arbitrary fancy, prejudice, or whim.
+
+But all this does not prevent him from being one of the best
+letter-writers in the English language: and if you take bulk of work
+along with variety of subject; maintenance of interest and craftsmanship
+as well as bulk, perhaps the very best of all. The latest standard
+edition of his letters, to which additions are still being made, is in
+sixteen well-filled volumes, and there are probably few readers of good
+taste and fair knowledge who would object if it could be extended to
+sixty. There is perhaps no body of epistles except Madame de Sevigne's
+own--which Horace fervently admired and, assisted perhaps by the
+feminine element in his own nature, copied assiduously--exhibiting the
+possible charm of letter-writing more distinctly or more copiously.
+
+To examine the nature of this charm a little cannot be irrelevant in
+such an Introduction as this: and from what has just been said it would
+seem that these letters will form as good a specimen for examination as
+any. They are not very much "mannerised": indeed, nobody but Thackeray,
+in the wonderful chapter of _The Virginians_ where Horace is made to
+describe his first interview with one of the heroes, has ever quite
+imitated them. Their style, though recognisable at once, is not a matter
+so much of phrase as of attitude. His revelations of character--his own
+that is to say, for Horace was no conjuror with any one else's--are
+constant but not deeply drawn. He cannot, or at least does not, give a
+plot of any kind: every letter is a sort of _review_ of the
+subject--larger or smaller--from the really masterly accounts of the
+trial of the Jacobite Lords after the "Forty-five" to the most trivial
+notices of people going to see "Strawberry"; of remarkable hands at
+cards; of Patty Blount (Pope's Patty) in her autumn years passing his
+windows with her gown tucked up because of the rain. Art and letters
+appear; travelling and visiting; friendship and society; curious belated
+love-making with the Miss Berrys; scandal (a great deal of it); charity
+(a little, but more than the popular conception of Horace allows for);
+the court-calendar, club life, almost all manner of things except
+religion (though it is said Horace had an early touch of Methodism) and
+really serious thought of any kind, form the budget of his letter-bag.
+And it is all handled with the most unexpected equality of success.
+There is of course nothing very "arresting." Cooking chickens in a sort
+of picnic with madcap ladies, and expecting "the dish to fly about our
+ears" is perhaps the most exciting incident[17] of the sixteen volumes
+and seven or eight thousand pages. But everywhere there is interest; and
+that of a kind that does not stale itself.
+
+The fact would seem to be that the art of letter-writing is a sort of
+mosaic or macedoine of nearly all departments of the general Art of
+Literature. You want constant touches of the art narrative, and not very
+seldom some of the art dramatic. Always you want that of
+conversation--subtly differentiated. Occasionally, though in the
+ordinary letter not very often, you want argument: much oftener
+description. Pathos, tenderness, etc., are more exceptionally required:
+and it is, in modern times at least, generally accepted that in the
+letter consolatory, that almost greatest of Shakespearian magic phrases,
+"the rest is silence" should never be forgotten and very quickly
+applied. Wit is welcome, if it be well managed: but that is a pretty
+constant proviso in regard to the particular element. Perhaps the
+greatest negative caution of all is that the letter should not be
+_obviously_ "written for publication."
+
+Now the curious thing about Walpole is that his letters were, pretty
+certainly in some cases (those to Mann) and not improbably in nearly
+all, written with some view to publication if only of a limited sort,
+and yet that the intention is rarely prominent to an offensive degree.
+Even if we did not know the curious and disgusting tricks that Pope
+played with his, we should be certain that he was always thinking of the
+possibility of somebody else than the reader to whom they were
+addressed reading them. With nearly an equal presumption as to the fact
+in the case of Horace (though to do him justice he did not indulge in
+any ignoble tricks with them) this fact rarely occurs and never offends.
+An unkind critic with a turn for rather obvious epigram might say that
+the man's nature was so artificial that his artifice seems natural. If
+so, all the more credit to him as an artificer. And another feather in
+his cap is that, although you can hardly ever mistake the writer, his
+letters take a slight but sufficient colour of difference according to
+the personality of the recipient. He does not write to Montagu exactly
+as he writes to Mann; to Gray as to Mason; to Lady Upper-Ossory as to
+earlier she-correspondents. So once more, though there are large and
+important possible subjects for letters on which "Horry" does not write
+at all, it is questionable whether, everything being counted in that he
+has, and no unfair offsets allowed for what he does not attempt, we have
+in English any superior to him as a letter-writer.
+
+[Sidenote: GRAY]
+
+The case of another famous eighteenth-century epistoler--Walpole's
+schoolfellow and except for the time of a quarrel (the blame of which
+Horace rather generously took upon himself but in which there were
+doubtless faults on both sides)[18] life-long friend--is curiously
+different. Gray was a poet, while Walpole, save for a touch of fantastic
+imagination, had nothing of poetry in him and could not, as some who
+are not poets can, even appreciate it. In more than one other
+intellectual gift he soared above Horace. He was essentially a scholar,
+while his friend was as essentially a sciolist. He even combined the
+scientific with the literary temperament to a considerable extent: and
+thus was enabled to display an orderliness of thought by no means
+universal in men of letters, and (at least according to common
+estimation) positively rare in poets. His tastes were as various as his
+friend's: but instead of being a mere bundle of casual likings and
+dislikings, they were aesthetically conceived and connected. He was not
+exactly an amiable person: indeed, though there was less spitefulness in
+him than in Horace there was, perhaps, more positive "bad blood." As for
+the feature in his character, or at least conduct, that impressed itself
+so much on Mr. Matthew Arnold--that he "never spoke out"--it might be
+thought, if it really existed, to have been rather fatal to
+letter-writing, in which a sense of constraint and "keeping back" is one
+of the very last things to be desired. And some of the positive
+characteristics and accomplishments above enumerated (not the
+poetry--poets have usually been good epistolers) might not seem much
+more suitable.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, Gray _is_ a good letter-writer--a very
+good letter-writer indeed. His letters, as might be expected from what
+has been said, carry much heavier metal than Horace's; but in another
+sense they are not in the least heavy. They are very much less in bulk
+than those of the longer lived and more "scriblative" though hardly more
+leisured writer:[19] and--as not a defect but a consequence of the
+quality just attributed to them--they do not quite carry the reader
+along with them in that singular fashion which distinguishes the others.
+But no one save a dunce can find them dull: and their variety is
+astonishing when one remembers that the writer was, for great part of
+his life, a kind of recluse. He touches almost everything except love
+(one wonders whether there were any unpublished, and feels pretty sure
+that there must have been some unwritten, letters to Miss Speed which
+would have filled the gap) and with a result of artistic success even
+more decided than that assigned to Goldsmith's versatility by Gray's
+enemy or at least "incompatible" Johnson.[20] His letters of travel are
+admirable: his accounts of public affairs, though sometimes extremely
+prejudiced, very clever; those of University society and squabbles among
+the very best that we have in English; those touching "the picturesque"
+extremely early and remarkably clear-sighted; those touching literature
+among the least one-sided of their time. If there are, as observed or
+hinted above, some unamiable touches, his persistent protection of the
+poor creature Mason; his general attitude to his friends the Whartons;
+and his communications with younger men like Norton Nicholls and
+Bonstetten, go far to remove, or, at least, to counterbalance, the
+impression.
+
+This last division indeed, and the letters to Mason, emphasize what is
+evident enough in almost all, a freedom on his part (which from some
+things in his character and history we might not altogether have
+expected) from a fault than which hardly any is more disagreeable in
+letters. This is the manifestation of what is called, in various more or
+less familiar terms, "giving oneself airs," "side," "patronising," etc.
+He may sometimes come near this pitfall of "intellectuals," but he never
+quite slips into it, being probably preserved by that sense of humour
+which he certainly possessed, though he seldom gave vent to it in verse
+and not very often in prose. Taking them altogether, Gray's letters may
+be said to have few superiors in the combination of intellectual weight
+and force with "pastime" interest. To some of course they may be chiefly
+or additionally interesting because of such light as they throw or
+withhold on a rather problematic character, but this, like the allegory
+in Spenser according to Hazlitt, "won't bite" anyone who lets it alone.
+They are extremely good letters to read: and the more points of interest
+they provide for any reader the better for that reader himself. Once
+more too, they illustrate the principle laid down at the beginning of
+this paper. They are good letters because they are, with the usual
+subtle difference necessary, like very good talk, recorded.[21]
+
+[Sidenote: COWPER]
+
+Nor is there any more doubt about the qualifications of the fifth of our
+selected eighteenth-century letter-writers. Cowper's poetry has gone
+through not very strongly marked but rather curious variations of
+critical estimate. Like all transition writers he was a little too much
+in front of the prevailing taste of his own time, and a little too much
+behind that of the time immediately succeeding. There may have been a
+very brief period, before the great romantic poets of the early
+nineteenth century became known, when he "drove" young persons like
+Marianne Dashwood "wild": but Marianne Dashwoods and their periods
+succeed and do not resemble each other.[22] He had probably less hold on
+this time--when he had the best chance of popularity--than Crabbe, one
+of his own group, while he was destitute of the extraordinary
+appeals--which might be altogether unrecognised for a time but when felt
+are unmistakable--of the other two, Burns and Blake, of the poets of the
+seventeen-eighties. His religiosity was a doubtful "asset" as people say
+nowadays: and even his pathetic personal history had its awkward side.
+But as to his letters there has hardly at any time, since they became
+known, existed a difference of opinion among competent judges. There may
+be some unfortunates for whom they are too "mild": but we hardly reckon
+as arbiters of taste the people for whom even brandy is too mild unless
+you empty the cayenne cruet into it. Moreover the "tea-pot pieties" (as
+a poet-critic who ought to have known better once scornfully called
+them) make no importunate appearance in the bulk of the correspondence:
+while as regards the madness this supplies one of the most puzzling and
+perhaps not the least disquieting of "human documents." A reader may
+say--by no means in his haste, but after consideration--not merely
+"Where is the slightest sign of insanity in these?" but "How on earth
+did it happen that the writer of these _ever_ went mad?" even with the
+assistance of Newton, and Teedon, and, one has to say, Mrs. Unwin.
+
+For among the characteristics of Cowper's letters at their frequent and
+pretty voluminous best, are some that seem not merely inconsistent with
+insanity, but likely to be positive antidotes to and preservatives from
+it. There is a quiet humour--not of the fantastic kind which, as in
+Charles Lamb, forces us to admit the possibility of near alliance to
+_over_-balance of mind--but _counter_-balancing, antiseptic, _salt_.
+There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent
+manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we
+are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of
+ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem,
+"What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble
+substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency
+and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief. But it
+is quite relevant to point out that all the good things noticed are
+things distinctly and definitely good for letter-writing. And sometimes
+one cannot help regretfully wondering whether, if he--who dealt so
+admirably with such interests as were open to him--had had more and
+wider ones to deal with, _we_ should not have had still more varied and
+still more delightful letters, and _he_ would have escaped the terrible
+fate that fell on him. For although Cowper was the reverse of selfish
+in the ordinary sense, he was intensely self-centred, and his life gave
+too much opportunity for that excessive self-concentration which is the
+very hotbed of mental disease.
+
+It is not a little surprising from this point of view, and it perhaps
+shows how imperative the letter-writing faculty is when it is
+possessed--that Cowper's letters are as good as they are: while that
+point of view also helps us to understand why they are sometimes not so
+good.
+
+    Of all the floating thoughts we find
+    Upon the surface of the mind,
+
+as he himself very happily sums up the subjects of letter-writing, there
+are few in his case which are of more unequal value than his criticisms.
+Cowper had more than one of the makings of a critic, and a very
+important critic. He was, or at any rate had been once, something of a
+scholar; he helped to effect and (which is not always or perhaps even
+often the case) helped _knowingly_ to effect, one of the most
+epoch-making changes in English literature. But for the greater part of
+his life he read very little; he had little chance of anything like
+literary discussion with his peers; and accordingly his critical remarks
+are random, uncoordinated, and mostly a record of what struck him at the
+moment in the way of like and dislike, agreement or disagreement.
+
+But then there is nothing that we go for to Cowper as a letter-writer so
+little as for things of this kind: and even things of this kind take the
+benefit of what Coleridge happily called--and what everybody has since
+wisely followed Coleridge in calling--his "divine chit-chat." As with
+Walpole--though with that difference of idiosyncrasy which all the best
+things have from one another--it does not in the least matter what,
+among mundane affairs at least, Cowper was talking about. If his
+conversation--and some of the few _habitues_ of Olney say it was--was
+anything like his letter-writing, it is no wonder that people sat over
+even breakfast for an hour to "satisfy sentiment not appetite" as they
+said with that slight touch of priggishness which has been visited upon
+them heavily, but which perhaps had more to do with their merits than
+more mannerless periods will allow.
+
+And not even Walpole's show to quite the same degree, that extraordinary
+power of making anything interesting--of entirely transcending the
+subject--which belongs to the letter-writer in probably a greater
+measure than to any man-of-letters in the other sense, except the poet.
+The matter which these letters have to chronicle is often the very
+smallest of small beer. The price, conveyance and condition of the fish
+his correspondents buy for him or give him (Cowper was very fond of fish
+and lived, before railways, in the heart of the Midlands); one of the
+most uneventful of picnics; hares and hair (one of his most
+characteristic pieces of quietly ironic humour is a brief descant on
+wigs with a suggestion that fashion should decree the cutting off of
+people's own legs and the substitution of artificial ones); the height
+of chairs and candlesticks--anything will do. He remarks gravely
+somewhere, "What nature expressly designed me for, I have never been
+able to conjecture; I seem to myself so universally disqualified for the
+common and customary occupations and amusements of mankind." Perhaps
+poetry--at least poetry of the calibre of "Yardley Oak," and "The
+Castaway," of "Boadicea" and the "Royal George" in one division; of
+"John Gilpin" in the other, may not be quite properly classed among the
+"common and customary occupations of mankind." But letter-writing might
+without great impropriety be so classed: and there cannot be the
+slightest doubt that Nature intended Cowper for a letter-writer. Whether
+he writes "The passages and events of the day as well as of the night
+are little better than dreams" or "An almost general cessation of
+egg-laying among the hens has made it impossible for Mrs. Unwin to
+enterprise a cake" one has (but perhaps a little more vividly) that
+agreeable sensation which at one time visited Tennyson's Northern
+Farmer. One "thinks he's said what he ought to 'a said" in the exact
+manner in which he ought to have said it.
+
+[Sidenote: MINORS]
+
+It is however most important to remember that these Five are only, as it
+were, commanding officers of the great Army, representative of the very
+numerous constituents, who do the service and enjoy the franchise of
+letter-writing in the eighteenth century. There is hardly a writer of
+distinction in any other kind whose letters are not noteworthy; and
+there are very numerous letter-writers of interest who are scarcely
+distinguished in any other way. Perhaps Fielding disappoints us most in
+this section by the absence of correspondence, all the more so that the
+"Voyage to Lisbon" is practically letter-stuff of the best. From
+Smollett also we might have more--especially more like his letter to
+Wilkes on the subject of the supposed impressment of Johnson's negro
+servant Frank, which we hope to give here. Sterne's character would
+certainly be better if his astonishing daughter had suppressed some of
+his epistles, but it would be much less distinct, and they are often, if
+sometimes discreditably so, amusing if not edifying. The vast mass of
+Richardson's correspondence would correspond in another sense to the
+volume of his novels. We have letters from Berkeley at the beginning and
+others from Gibbon at the end--these last peculiarly valuable, because,
+as sometimes but not perhaps very often happens, they do not merely
+illustrate but supplement and complete the published work. From ladies,
+courtly, domestic, literary and others, we have shelves--and cases--and
+almost libraries full; from the lively chat of the Lepels and Bellendens
+and Howards of the early Georgian time to those copious and unstudied
+but never dull, compositions which Fanny Burney poured forth to "Susan
+and Fredy," to Maria Allen and to "Daddy Crisp" and a score of others;
+those of the Montagu circle; the documents upon which some have based
+aspersion and others defence of Mrs. Thrale; and the prose utterances of
+the "Swan of Lichfield," otherwise Miss Seward.[24] There are
+Shenstone's letters for samples of one kind and those of the Revd. Mr.
+Warner (the supposed original of Thackeray's Parson Sampson) for another
+and very different one. Even outside the proper and real "mail-bag"
+letter all sorts of writings--travels, pamphlets, philosophical and
+theological arguments, almost everything--throw themselves into the
+letter form. To come back to that with which we began there is no doubt
+that the eighteenth century is the century of the letter with us.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY
+
+
+[Sidenote: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUPS]
+
+There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting here that
+the art of letter-writing died with the century in which it flourished
+so greatly. In the first place, periods of literary art seldom or never
+"die" in a moment like a tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion
+that centennial years necessarily divide such periods, as well as the
+centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical delusion. There have
+been dates in our history--1400 was one of them--where something of the
+kind seems to have happened: but they are very rare. Most ships of
+literature at such times are fortunately what is called in actual ships
+"clinker-built"--that is to say overlappingly--and except at 1600 this
+has never been so much the case as two hundred years later and one
+hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
+Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty
+years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of
+them well, past the conventional "coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and
+Shelley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first
+mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century
+idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from
+Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Shelley
+and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two
+individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns
+letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer,
+and nobody who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so.
+The first requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"--in a rather
+peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it has been
+employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth could _preach_--nearly
+always in a manner deserving respect and sometimes in one commanding
+almost infinite admiration; but when the letter-writer begins to preach
+he is in danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's
+letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but more than one
+of his weaknesses appears in them.
+
+The excellence of Scott's, though always discoverable in Lockhart, was
+perhaps never easily appreciable till they were separately collected and
+published not very many years ago. It may indeed be suggested that the
+"Life and Letters" system, though very valuable as regards the "Life" is
+apt a little to obscure the excellence of the "Letters" themselves. Of
+this particular collection it is not too much to say that while it threw
+not the least stain on the character of one of the most faultless (one
+singular and heavily punished lapse excepted) of men of letters, it
+positively enhanced our knowledge of the variety of his literary powers.
+
+Perhaps however the best of letter-writers amongst these four
+protagonists of the great Romantic Revival in England (the inevitable
+attempt sometimes made now to quarrel with that term is as inevitably
+silly) is the least good poet. Southey's letters, never yet fully but
+very voluminously published, have not been altogether fortunate in
+their fashion of publication. There have been questionings about the
+propriety of "Selected" Works; but there surely can be little doubt that
+in the case of Letters a certain amount of selection is not only
+justifiable but almost imperative. Everyone at all addicted to
+correspondence must know that in writing to different people on the same
+or closely adjacent days, if "anything has" in the common phrase
+"happened" he is bound to repeat himself. He may, if he has the sense of
+art, take care to vary his phrase even though he knows that no two
+letters will have the same reader; but he cannot vary his matter much.
+Southey's letters, in the two collections by his son and his son-in-law,
+were edited without due regard to this: and the third--those to Caroline
+Bowles, his second wife--might have been "thinned" in a different way.
+But the bulk of interesting matter is still very large and the quality
+of the presentation is excellent. If anyone fears to plunge into some
+dozen volumes let him look at the "Cats" and the "Statues" of Greta
+Hall, printed at the end of the _Doctor_, but both in form and nature
+letters. He will not hesitate much longer, if he knows good letter-stuff
+when he sees it.[25]
+
+[Sidenote: LANDOR]
+
+Most of the second group wrote letters worth reading, but only one of
+them reaches the first rank in the art; it is true that he is among the
+first _of_ the first. The letters of Landor supply not the least part of
+that curious problem which is presented by his whole work. They
+naturally give less room than the _apices_ of his regular prose and of
+his poetry for that marvellous perfection of style and phrase which is
+allowed even by those who complain of a want of substance in him. And
+another complaint of his "aloofness" affects them in two ways rather
+damagingly. When it is present it cuts at the root of one of the chief
+interests of letters, which is intimacy. When it is absent, and Landor
+presents himself in his well-known character of an angry baby (as for
+instance when he remarked of the Bishop who did not do something he
+wanted, that "God alone is great enough for him [Walter Savage Landor]
+to ask anything of _twice_") he becomes merely--or perhaps to very
+amiable folk rather painfully--ridiculous. De Quincey and Hazlitt
+diverted a good deal of what might have been utilised as mere
+letter-writing faculty into their very miscellaneous work for
+publication. Moore could write very good letters himself: but is perhaps
+most noted and notable in connection with the subject as being one of
+the earliest and best "Life-and-Letters" craftsmen in regard to Byron.
+
+But none of these restrictions or provisos is requisite, or could for a
+moment be thought of, in reference to Charles Lamb. Of him, as of hardly
+any other writer of great excellence (perhaps Thackeray is most like him
+in this way) it can be said that if we had nothing but his letters we
+should almost be able to detect the qualities which he shows in his
+regular works. Some of the _Essays of Elia_ and his other miscellanies
+are or pretend to be actual letters. Certainly not a few of his letters
+would seem not at all strange and by no means unable to hold up their
+heads, if they had appeared as Essays of that singularly fortunate
+Italian who had his name taken, _not_ in vain but in order to be titular
+author of some of the choicest things in literature.
+
+Indeed that unique combination of bookishness and native fancy which
+makes the "Eliesque" quality is obviously as well suited to the letter
+as to the essay, and would require but a stroke or two of the pen, in
+addition or deletion, to produce examples of either. One often feels as
+if it must have been, as the saying goes, a toss-up whether the _London
+Magazine_ or some personal friend got a particular composition; whether
+it was issued to the public direct or waited for Serjeant Talfourd to
+collect and edit it. The two English writers whom, on very different
+sides of course, Lamb most resembles, and whom he may be said to have
+copied (of course as genius copies) most, are Sterne and Sir Thomas
+Browne. But between the actual letters and the actual works of these
+two, themselves, there is a great difference, while (as has just been
+noted) in Lamb's case there is none. The reason of course is that though
+Sir Thomas is one of our very greatest authors and the Reverend Yorick
+not by any means unplaced in the running for greatness, both are in the
+highest degree artificial: while Lamb's way of writing, complex as it
+is, necessitating as it must have done not a little reading and (as
+would seem almost necessary) not a little practice, seems to run as
+naturally as a child's babble. The very tricks--mechanical dots, dashes,
+aposiopeses--which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar
+Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from
+Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are
+born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at
+all. Now this naturalness--it can hardly be said too often here--is the
+one thing needful in letters. The different forms of it may be as
+various and as far apart from each other as those of the other Nature
+in flora or fauna, on mountain and sea, in field and town. But if it is
+there, all is right.
+
+[Sidenote: BYRON]
+
+There are few more interesting groups in the population of our subject
+than that formed by the three poets whom we mentioned last when
+classifying the epistolers of the early nineteenth century. There is
+hardly one of them who has not been ranked by some far from contemptible
+judgments among our greatest as poets; and merely as letter-writers they
+have been put correspondingly high by others or the same. It is rather
+curious that the most contested as to his place as a poet has been, as a
+rule, allowed it most easily as a letter-writer. The enormous vogue
+which Byron's verse at once attained both at home and abroad--has at
+home if not abroad (where reputations of poets often depend upon
+extra-poetical causes) long ceased to be undisputed: indeed has chiefly
+been sustained by spasmodic and not too successful exertions of
+individuals. It was never, of course, paralleled in regard to his
+letters. But these letters early obtained high repute and have never, in
+the general estimate, lost it. Some good judges even among those who do
+not care very much for the poems, have gone so far as to put him among
+our very best epistolers; and few have put him very much lower.
+Acceptance of the former estimate certainly--perhaps even of the
+latter--depends however upon the extent to which people can also accept
+recognition in Byron of the qualities of "Sincerity and Strength." That
+he was always a great though often a careless craftsman, and sometimes a
+great artist in literature, nobody possessed of the slightest critical
+ability can deny or doubt. But there are some who shake their heads over
+the attribution of anything like "sincerity" to him, except very
+occasionally: and who if they had to translate his "strength" into Greek
+would select the word _Bia_ ("violence") and not the word _Kratos_
+(simple "strength") from the _dramatis personae_ of the _Prometheus
+Vinctus_. Now "sincerity" of a kind--even of that kind which we found in
+Walpole and did not find in Pope--has been contended for here as a
+necessity in the best, if not in all good, letters; and "violence" is
+almost fatal to them. Of a certain kind of letter Byron was no doubt a
+skilful practitioner.[26] But to some it will or may always seem that
+the vital principle of his correspondence is to that of the real "Best"
+as stage life to life off the stage. These two can sometimes approach
+each other marvellously: but they are never the same thing.
+
+[Sidenote: SHELLEY]
+
+When Mr. Matthew Arnold expressed the opinion that Shelley's letters
+were more valuable than his poetry it was, of course, as Lamb said of
+Coleridge "only his fun." In the words of another classic, he "did it to
+annoy, because he knew it teased" some people. The absurdity is perhaps
+best antagonised by the perfectly true remark that it only shows that
+Mr. Arnold understood the letters and did not understand the poetry. But
+it was a little unfortunate, not for the poetry but for the letters,
+against which it might create a prejudice. They are so good that they
+ought not to have been made victims of what in another person the same
+judge would have called, and rightly, a _saugrenu_[27] judgment. Like
+all good letters--perhaps all without exception according to Demetrius
+and Newman--they carry with them much of their author's idiosyncrasy,
+but in a fashion which should help to correct certain misjudgments of
+that idiosyncrasy itself. Shelley _is_ "unearthly," but it is an entire
+mistake to suppose that his unearthliness can never become earthly to
+such an extent as is required. The beginning of _The Recollection_ ("We
+wandered to the pine forest") is as vivid a picture of actual scenery as
+ever appeared on the walls of any Academy: and _The Witch of Atlas_
+itself, not to mention the portrait-frescoes in _Adonais_, is quite a
+_waking_ dream. The quality of liveness is naturally still more
+prominent in the letters, because poetical transcendence of fact is not
+there required to accompany it. But it _does_ accompany now and then;
+and the result is a blend or brand of letter-writing almost as unlike
+anything else as the writer's poetry, and in its own (doubtless lower)
+kind hardly less perfect. To prefer the letters to the poems is merely
+foolish, and to say that they are as good as the poems is perhaps
+excessive. But they comment and complete the Shelley of the Poems
+themselves in a manner for which we cannot be too thankful.
+
+[Sidenote: KEATS]
+
+The letters of Keats did not attract much notice till long after those
+of Byron, and no short time after those of Shelley, had secured it. This
+was by no means wholly, though it may have been to some extent
+indirectly, due to the partly stupid and partly malevolent attempts to
+smother his poetical reputation in its cradle. The letters were
+inaccessible till the late Lord Houghton practically resuscitated Keats;
+and till other persons--rather in the "Codlin not Short" manner--rushed
+in to correct and supplement Mr. Milnes as he then was. And it was even
+much later still before two very different editors, Sir Sidney Colvin
+and the late Mr. Buxton Forman, completed, or nearly so, the
+publication. Something must be said and may be touched on later in
+connection with a very important division of our subject in general, as
+to the publication by the last-named, of the letters to Fanny Brawne:
+but nothing in detail need be written, and it is almost needless to say
+that none of these letters will appear here. No one but a brute who is
+also something of a fool will think any the worse of Keats for writing
+them. A thought of _sunt lacrimae rerum_ is all the price that need be
+paid by any one who chooses to read them, nor is it our business to
+characterise at length the taste and wits of the person who could
+publish them.[28]
+
+But putting this question aside, it is unquestionable that for some
+years past there has been a tendency to value the Letters as a whole
+very highly. Not only has unusual critical power been claimed for Keats
+on the strength of them, but general epistolary merit; and though
+nobody, so far as one knows, has yet paralleled the absurdity above
+mentioned in the case of Shelley, Keats has been taken by some
+credit-worthy judges as an unusually strong witness to the truth of the
+proposition already adopted here, that poets are good letter-writers.
+
+He certainly is no exception to the rule; but to what exact extent he
+exemplifies it may not be a matter to be settled quite off hand. There
+is no doubt that at his best Keats is excellent in this way, and that
+best is perhaps to be found with greatest certainty, by anyone who
+wants to dip before plunging, in the letters to his brother and
+sister-in-law, George and Georgiana. Those to his little sister Fanny
+are also charming in their way, though the peculiar and very happy
+mixture of life and literature to be found in the others does not, of
+course, occur in them. His letters of description, to whomsoever
+written, are, as one might expect, first-rate; and the very late
+specimen--one of his very last to anyone--to _Mrs._ not Miss Brawne is
+as brave as it is touching. As for the criticism, there are undoubtedly
+(as again we should expect from the author of the wonderful preface to
+_Endymion_) invaluable remarks--the inspiration of poetical practice
+turned into formulas of poetical theory. On the other hand, the famous
+advice to Shelley to "be more of an artist and load every rift with
+ore"--Shelley whose art transcends artistry and whose substance is as
+the unbroken nugget gold, so that there are no rifts in it to load--is,
+even when one remembers how often poets misunderstand each other,[29]
+rather "cold water to the back" of admiration.
+
+It may, however, not unfairly introduce a very few considerations on the
+side of Keats's letters which is not so good. All but idolaters
+acknowledge a certain boyishness in him--a boyishness which is in fact
+no mean source contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not
+always quite so charming in prose, and especially in letters. You do not
+want self-criticism of an obviously second-thought kind in them. But you
+do want that less obtrusive variety which prevents them from appearing
+unkempt, "down-at-heel" etc. Perhaps there is, at any rate in the
+earlier letters, something of this unkemptness in Keats as an epistoler.
+
+A hasty person may say "What! do you venture to quarrel with letters
+where, side by side with agreeable miscellaneous details, you may
+suddenly come upon the original and virgin text of 'La Belle Dame sans
+Merci'?" Most certainly not. Such a find, or one ten times less
+precious, would make one put up with accompaniments much more than ten
+times worse than the worst of Keats's letters. But it may be observed
+that the objection is only a fresh example of the unfortunate
+tendency[30] of mankind to "ignore elenchs" as the logicians say, or, as
+less pedantic phraseology has it, to talk beside the question. A man
+might put a thousand pound note (and you might spend many thousand pound
+notes without buying anything like the poem just mentioned) in a coarse,
+vulgar, trivial or in other ways objectionable letter. The note would be
+most welcome in itself, but it would not improve the quality of its
+covering epistle. Not, of course, that Keats's letters are coarse or
+vulgar, though they are sometimes rather trivial. But the point is that
+their excellency, _as_ letters, does not depend on their enclosures (as
+we may call them) or even directly on their importance as biography
+which is certainly consummate. Are they good letters as such, and of how
+much goodness? Have they been presented as letters should be presented
+for reading? These are points on which, considering the title and range
+of this Introduction, it may not be improper to offer a few
+observations. We have already ventured to suggest that, if not the "be
+all and end all," at any rate the quality to be first enquired into as
+to its presence or its absence in letters, is "naturalness." And we have
+said something as to the propriety or impropriety of different modes of
+editing and publishing them. The present division of the subject seems
+to afford a specially good text for adding something more on both these
+matters.
+
+As to the first point, the text is specially good because of the
+position of Keats in the most remarkable group in which we have rather
+found than placed him. To the present writer, as a reader, it seems, as
+has been already said whether justly or unjustly, that the element of
+"naturalness"--it is an ugly word, and French has no better, in fact
+none at all: though German is a little luckier with _natuerlichkeit_ and
+Spanish much with _naturaleza_--is rather conspicuously deficient in
+Byron. In Shelley it is pre-eminent, and can only be missed by those who
+have no kindred touch of the nature which it reflects. Shelley could be
+vague, unpractical, mystical; he could sometimes be just a little silly;
+but it was no more possible for him to be affected, or to make those
+slips of taste which are a sort of _minus_ corresponding to the _plus_
+of affectation, than it was (after _Queen Mab_ at least) to write
+anything that was not poetry. Thus in addition to the literary
+perfection of his letters, they have the _sine qua non_ of naturalness
+in perfection also.
+
+But with Keats things are different. Opinions differ as to whether he
+ever quite reached maturity even in poetry to the extent into which
+Shelley struck straight with _Alastor_, never losing it afterwards, and
+leaving us only to wonder what conceivable accomplishment might have
+even transcended _Adonais_ and its successors. That with all his
+marvellous promise and hardly less marvellous achievement, Keats was
+only reaching maturity when he died has been generally allowed by the
+saner judgments.[31] Now _im_maturity has perhaps its own naturalness
+which is sometimes, and in a way, very charming, but is not the
+naturalness pure and simple of maturity. Children are sometimes, nay
+often, very pretty, agreeable and amusing things: but there comes a time
+when we rather wish they would go to the nursery. Perhaps the
+"sometimes" occurs with Keats's earlier letters if not with his later.
+
+[Sidenote: EDITING OF LETTERS]
+
+He is thus also a text for the second part of our sermon--the duty of
+editors and publishers of correspondence. There is much to be said for
+the view that publication, as it has been put, "is an unpardonable sin,"
+that is to say, that no author (or rather no author's ghost) can justly
+complain if what he once deliberately published is, when all but the
+control of the dead hand is off, republished. _Il l'a voulu_, as the
+famous tag from Moliere has it. But letters in the stricter sense--that
+is to say, pieces of private correspondence--are in very different case.
+Not only were they, save in very few instances, never _meant_ for
+publication: but, which is of even more importance, they were never
+_prepared_ for publication.[32] Not only, again, did the writer never
+see them in "proof," much less in "revise," as the technical terms go,
+but he never, so far as we know, exercised on them even the revision
+which all but the most careless authors give before sending their
+manuscripts to the printer. Some people of course do read over their
+letters before sending them: but it must be very rarely and in special,
+not to say dubious, cases that they do this with a view to the thing
+being seen by any other eyes than those of the intended recipient. It is
+therefore to the last degree unfair to plump letters on the market
+unselected and uncastigated. To what length the castigation should
+proceed is of course matter for individual taste and judgment. Nothing
+must be put in--that is clear; but as to what may or should be left out,
+"there's the rub." Perhaps the best criterion, though it may be admitted
+to be not very easy of application, is "Would the author, in publishing,
+have left it out or not?" Sometimes this will pass very violent
+expressions of opinion and even sentiments of doubtful morality and
+wisdom. But that it should invariably exclude mere trivialities, faults
+of taste, slovenlinesses of expression, etc., is at least the opinion of
+the present writer. And a "safety razor" of such things might perhaps
+with advantage have been used on Keats's, though he has written nothing
+which is in the least discreditable to him.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. LATER
+
+
+[Sidenote: A NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUP]
+
+Part at least of these general remarks has a very special relevance to
+the rest of our story. There may be differences of respectable opinion
+as to the system of editing just advocated; but they will hardly concern
+one point--that the susceptibilities of living persons must be
+considered. To some extent indeed this is a mere counsel of selfish
+prudence: for an editor who neglects it may get himself into serious
+difficulties. Even where such danger does not exist, or might perhaps be
+disregarded, it is impossible for any decent person to run the risk of
+needlessly offending others. It will be seen at once that this
+introduces a new matter for consideration in regard to most--practically
+all--of the correspondences which we have still to survey. Even those
+just discussed have only recently passed from under its range. Shelley's
+son died not so very long ago: grandchildren of Byron much more
+recently; and if Keats had lived to the ordinary age of man and had, as
+he very likely would have done, married not Fanny Brawne, but somebody
+else later, a son or daughter of his (daughters are particularly and
+sometimes inconveniently loyal to their deceased parents) might be alive
+and flourishing now. As this constraint extends not merely to the
+families of the writers but to those of persons mentioned by them (not
+to speak of these persons themselves in the most recent cases), it
+exercises, as will at once be seen, a most wide-ranging cramp and brake
+upon publication. Blunders are occasionally made of course: the most
+remarkable in recent times was probably an oversight of the editor of
+Edward FitzGerald's letters, than which hardly any more interesting
+exist among those yet to be noticed. FitzGerald, quite innocently and
+without the slightest personal malevolence but thinking only of Mrs.
+Browning's work, had expressed himself (as anybody might in a private
+letter) to the effect that perhaps we need not be sorry for her death.
+Unfortunately the letter was published while her husband was still
+alive: and many people must remember the very natural and excusable, but
+somewhat excessive and undignified, explosion which followed on his
+part.
+
+Such things must of course be avoided at all costs; and the consequence
+is that nineteenth century letters must frequently--in fact with rare if
+any exceptions--have appeared in a condition of expurgation which cannot
+but have affected their spirit and savour to a very considerable extent.
+It is for instance understood that Mr. Matthew Arnold's were very
+severely censored; and, while readily believing this and acquiescing in
+its probable propriety, the old Adam in some readers may be unable to
+refrain from regret.
+
+Again, there is something to be said about the less good effects of that
+"Life-and-Letters" system which has been quite rightly welcomed and
+praised for its better ones. Drawing on the Letters--with good material
+to work on and good skill in the worker--improves the Life enormously;
+but it is by no means certain--indeed it has been hinted already--that
+the Letters themselves do not to a certain extent lose by it. Indeed
+from one point of view, the word "loss" may be used in its most literal
+meaning. The compiler of one very famous biography was said, for
+instance, to have--with a disregard of the value of letters as
+autographs which was magnificent perhaps in one way but far from "the
+game" in others--cut up the actual sheets and pasted the pieces on his
+manuscript, sending the whole to the printers and chancing the survival
+even of what was sent, when it came back with the proofs.
+
+But there is another sense of "loss" which has also to be reckoned. The
+framework of biography is, or at least ought to be, something more than
+a mere frame: and it distracts attention from the letters themselves,
+breaks up their continuous effect, and in many cases necessitates at
+least occasional omission of parts which an editor of them by themselves
+would not think of excluding. Of course this is no argument against the
+plan as such: but it has, together with what was said recently, to be
+taken into account when we compare the epistolary position of the last
+century with that of its immediate predecessor.[33]
+
+These remarks are made not in the least by way of depreciating or even
+making an apology for nineteenth century letters, but only in order to
+put the reader in a proper state for critical estimation of them. Nor is
+it necessary to repeat--still less to discuss--the more general
+lamentations with some reference to which we started as to any decay of
+letter-writing. Provisos and warnings may be taken as having been made
+sufficiently: and we pass to the actual survey.
+
+It may have been noticed in reference to the principal group of
+letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the exception of Cowper,
+they were all acquainted with each other. Walpole knew Lady Mary,
+Chesterfield and Gray; while Gray, if he did not know the other two,
+knew Walpole very well indeed. Something of the same sort might be
+contended for among those whom we have selected on the bridge of the
+eighteenth and nineteenth. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Lamb were
+of course intimately connected: Southey knew Landor and Shelley, Keats
+knew Shelley, Wordsworth and Lamb; while Byron and Shelley, however
+unequally, were pretty closely yoked together. It is not meant that in
+all these groups everybody wrote to each other; but that the writing
+faculty was curiously prominent--diffused like a kind of atmosphere--in
+all. Now if we look in the nineteenth for such a group it will be found
+perhaps less readily. But one such at least certainly exists, to wit
+that which includes Tennyson, Thackeray, Edward FitzGerald, Carlyle and
+his wife, Fanny Kemble, Sterling and one or two more. There are of
+course numerous others outside this group, and even in it Tennyson
+himself is not a very remarkable letter-writer, any more than his great
+rival, Browning, was. But there was the same diffusion of the
+letter-writing spirit which has been noticed above, and Thackeray,
+FitzGerald, the Carlyles, and perhaps Fanny Kemble are quite of the
+greater clans among our peculiar people.
+
+The most remarkable of all these--and as it seems to the present writer,
+one of the most remarkable of all English letter-writers is one whose
+letters have never been collected,[34] and from whom, until
+comparatively lately, we had only few and as it were accidental
+specimens. It is hoped that, notwithstanding the great changes of taste
+recently as to reticence or indiscretion, there are still many people
+who can not only understand but thoroughly sympathise with Thackeray's
+disgust at the idea of having his "Life" written; and the even greater
+reluctance which he would certainly have felt at that of having his
+letters published. But, as has been suggested on a former occasion, when
+things _are_ published there is nothing disgraceful in reading them: and
+it may be frankly admitted that lovers of English literature would have
+missed much pleasure and the opportunity of much admiration if the
+"Brookfield" letters, those to the Baxter family and others in America,
+those finally included in the "Biographical" edition, and yet others
+which have turned up sporadically had remained unknown. It may be
+doubted whether there is anything like them in our literature--if indeed
+there is in any other--for the double, treble or even more complicated
+gift of view into character, matter of interest, positive literary
+satisfaction, and (perhaps most remarkable of all) resemblance to and
+explanation of the author's "regular literature," as it has been called.
+In some respects they resemble the letters of Keats; but there is absent
+from them the immaturity which was noted in those, and which extended to
+both matter and style. They are more various in subject and tone than
+Shelley's. They are not deliberately quaint like Lamb's; and they
+naturally lack (whether this is wholly an advantage or not, may admit,
+though not here, of dispute) the restraint[35] which, in greater or less
+degree and in varied kind, characterizes the great eighteenth century
+epistolers.
+
+[Sidenote: THACKERAY]
+
+One additional charm which many of them possess may be regarded by
+extreme precisians as of doubtful legitimacy as far as comment here is
+concerned: but this may be ruled out as a superfluous scruple. It is the
+illumination of the text "by the author's own candles" as he himself
+says in a well-known Introduction: the actual "illustration" by
+insertion in the script, of little pen-drawings. The shortcomings of
+Thackeray's draughtsmanship have always been admitted: and by nobody
+more frankly than by himself. But they hardly affect this sort of
+"picturing" at all. The unfortunate inability to depict a pretty face
+which he deplored need do no harm whatever: and his lack of
+"composition" not much. A spice of caricature is almost invariably
+admissible in such things: and the same tricksy spirit which prompted
+the hundreds of initials, _culs-de-lampe_ etc. contributed by him to
+_Punch_ and to be found collected in the "Oxford" edition of his works,
+was most happily at hand for use in letters. Some years ago there
+appeared, in a catalogue of autographs for sale, an extract of text and
+cut which was irresistibly funny. The author and designer had had a
+mishap by slipping on that peculiarly treacherous suddenly frozen rain
+for which (though we are liable enough to it in England and though some
+living have seen the entire Strand turned into one huge pantomime
+scene, roars of laughter included, as people came out of theatres) we
+have no special name. (The French, in whose capital it is said to be
+even more frequent, call it _verglas_.) In telling it he had drawn
+himself sitting (as involuntarily though one hopes not so eternally as
+_infelix Theseus_) with arms, legs, hat, etcetera in disorder suitable
+to the occasion and with a facial expression of the most ludicrous
+dismay. It can hardly have taken a dozen strokes of the pen: but they
+simply glorified the letter.
+
+In no sense, however, can the value and delight of Thackeray's letters
+be said to depend upon this _bonus_ of illustration. Without it they
+would be among the most noteworthy and the most delectable of their
+kind. One sees in them the "first state" of that extraordinary glancing
+at all sorts of side-views, possible objections and comments on "what
+the other fellow thinks," which is the main secret in his published
+writings. If the view of him as a "sentimentalist" (which nobody, unless
+it is taken offensively, need refuse to accept) is strengthened by them,
+that absurd other view, which strangely prevailed so long, of his
+"cynicism" is utterly destroyed. We see the variety of his interests;
+the keenness of his sensations; the strange and kaleidoscopic rapidity
+of the changes in his mood and thought. And through the whole there runs
+the wonderful style which was so long unrecognised--nay, which those who
+go by the trumpery machine-made rules of "composition books" used
+gravely to stigmatise as "incorrect." Time lifts a great many (though
+not perhaps all) the restraints upon publication which have been
+discussed and advocated above: and it will probably be possible some day
+for posterity to possess, not only a collected body of the now scattered
+Thackeray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared
+even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our
+Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any previous occupant
+of those shelves: and one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar
+sense, the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For it will
+be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of its author's own--a
+_William Makepeace Thackeray_ in the familiar novel-form of title, and
+in the old Richardsonian form of contents--but oh! how different from
+anything of Richardson's save that it might possibly make you hang
+yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but because you
+had come to the end of it.
+
+[Sidenote: FITZGERALD]
+
+If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less complete
+presentation, already existing, of nineteenth century "Letters" in a
+body by a single writer, the palm must probably be given to those
+(already referred to) of the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayyam.
+Besides their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy, they
+have, for anyone studying the subject as we are endeavouring to do, a
+curious attraction of comparison. Letter-writing, though by no means
+exclusively, would appear to be specially and peculiarly the _forte_ of
+men who live somewhat special and peculiar lives--men without the
+ordinary family ties of wife and children--sometimes though by no means
+always, recluses; possibly to some extent "originals," "humourists,"
+"eccentrics," as they have been called at different times and from
+different points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society,
+belongs to the class after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield[36] and
+Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later period Lamb, are eminently
+of it. But hardly anyone so unquestionably comes under the
+classification as Edward FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time
+married, but that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it
+was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual cohabitation
+lasted but a short time. He had no children, and though he frequently
+foregathered with the family from which he sprang, he was essentially a
+"solitary." Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise
+themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the
+author of _Jacopo Ortis_, naturally enough find in letters the outlet
+for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in
+conversation, and the occupation which those others have ready-made, in
+society, business of all kinds etc. That some copious and excellent
+letter-writers, such as for instance Southey, have been extremely busy,
+and "family men" of the most unblemished character, merely shows that
+the rule is not universal. But it may be observed that their letters
+usually have less intense idiosyncrasy than those of the others.
+
+Of such idiosyncrasy, both in letters and in other work, few men have
+had more than the author of _Euphranor_ and (as we have had to say
+before) the "translator or paraphrast" not merely of Persian but of
+Spanish and Greek masterpieces. It is indeed notorious that it was in
+this latter capacity that he showed the individuality of his genius most
+strongly. It is a frequently but perhaps idly[38] disputed question how
+much is Omar and how much FitzGerald, while the problem might certainly
+be extended by asking how much is Aeschylus and how much Calderon in his
+versions of those masters: but it does not concern us here. What does
+concern us is the fact that he has contrived to make his most famous
+exercise in translation signally, and the others to some extent, not
+dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the
+spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both
+being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong
+nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great
+translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his
+scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in
+his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English
+Universities in connection with that of English literature knows, even
+if he has not been fortunate enough to experience it, the remarkable
+fashion in which, at certain times, colleges and coteries at Oxford and
+Cambridge have seemed to throw a strange and almost magical influence
+over a generation (hardly more) of undergraduates. There was
+unmistakably such an _aura_ or atmosphere about in Trinity College,
+Cambridge, during the last of the twenties and the first of the thirties
+of the nineteenth century--a spirit of literature and humour, of
+seriousness and jest, of prose sense and half mystical poetry--which
+produced things as diverse as _The Dying Swan_ and Clarke's _Library of
+Useless Knowledge_, _Vanity Fair_ and the English _Rubaiyat_.
+
+Of this curiously blended mood-combination--of which in their different
+ways Tennyson and Thackeray, as universally known, Brookfield, W. B.
+Donne, G. S. Venables, as less known, but noteworthy instances suggest
+themselves as examples--FitzGerald was certainly not the least
+remarkable. He had, as eccentrics usually and almost necessarily have,
+not a few limitations, some of which possibly were, though others
+certainly were not, deliberately assumed or accepted. He would not allow
+that Tennyson had ever in his later work (not latest by any means) done
+anything so good as his earlier. In that unlucky though quite blameless
+observation on Mrs. Browning which was referred to above, he ignored or
+showed himself unable to appreciate the fact that the poetess had never
+done anything better than, if anything so good as, some of her very
+latest work.[40] It cannot be considered an entirely adequate cause for
+ceasing to live with your wife,[41] that her dresses rustle; and many
+other instances of what may be called practical and literary
+_non-sequiturs_ might be alleged against him. But all these
+"queernesses" are evidence of a temperament and a mode of thinking which
+are likely to produce very satisfactory letters. They are sure not to be
+dull: and when the queerness is accompanied by such literary power as
+"Fitz" possessed they are not likely to be merely silly, as some things
+are which attempt not to be dull. As a matter of fact they are
+delightful: and their variety is astonishing. Odd stories and odd
+experiences seem, despite his almost claustral life, to have had a habit
+of flying to FitzGerald like filings to a magnet--as for instance the
+irresistible anecdote of the parish clerk who insisted on giving out for
+singing casual remarks of the parson above him as if they were verses of
+a hymn, and who was duly echoed by the congregation. Even when he does
+not make you laugh he satisfies you: even when you do not agree with him
+you are obliged to him for having expressed his heresy.
+
+[Sidenote: FANNY KEMBLE]
+
+One of FitzGerald's special correspondents was, for reasons then
+imperative, not a member of the Cambridge group itself, but as closely
+connected with it as possible: being the sister of one of its actual
+members. John M. Kemble, one of our earliest and best Anglo-Saxon
+scholars in modern times, was, like others of his famous family (so far
+as is generally known) a person of varied talents, though he showed
+these neither in letter writing nor in the direction which Tennyson
+incorrectly augured in the "Sonnet to J. M. K." His sister Frances
+(invariably, like most though by no means all ladies of her name, called
+"Fanny"[42]) was a very remarkable person indeed. After taking early and
+with brilliant success to the stage which might almost be said to be
+hers by inheritance,[43] she married an American planter with even worse
+results (they were actually divorced) than her friend FitzGerald's
+marriage brought about later: and for many years returned to public
+life, not as an actress but as a reader. She wrote and published both
+prose and verse of various kinds: but her best known work and that which
+places her here, is a voluminous series of "Records," etc., much of
+which is composed of actual letters, while practically the whole of it
+is what we have called "letter-stuff." It has perhaps been published
+_too_ voluminously: and it is certain that, as indeed one might expect,
+its parts are not equal in interest. But experienced and balanced
+judgment must always sum up in her favour as possessing, in letter- and
+even other writing, more than ordinary talent, perhaps never quite
+happily or fully developed. Merely as a person she seems to have
+exercised an extraordinary attraction without being exactly amiable[44]:
+and from the intellectual and artistic sides as a writer (we have
+nothing here to do with her histrionic powers) to have been what has
+sometimes in others been called "inorganic," "ill-regulated," "not
+brought off," etc., but of extraordinary capacity.
+
+This may have had something to do with her sudden and exceptional
+success, when at barely twenty, and with no training except what
+heredity might give her, she "took the town [and the country] by storm"
+as Juliet, and very soon afterwards "carried" America likewise. But her
+"records" of these and other things are of almost the first quality: and
+this power of "recording" continued and was perhaps stimulated by the
+less as well as the more fortunate events of her life. It may be said
+indeed that in her time a young woman of full age (she was five and
+twenty), unusual experience of the world, and still more unusual wits,
+had no business to marry a planter in the Southern States, knowing that
+she was to live there, unless she had reconciled herself to the
+institution of slavery. Nor can anybody without prejudice deny this. But
+the inconsistency and the troubles it developed gave occasion to some
+very remarkable "recording," and the same had been the case earlier with
+her life, whether at home, on the stage, or in society, and was the case
+later whether she lived in England, in the Northern States, or on the
+Continent of Europe. Perhaps you never exactly like her: an unusual
+experience in the reading of letters, which for the most part are
+singularly reconciling from the mere fact of their explanatory quality.
+There is indeed no better confirmation of the well-known French saying
+_tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_. Here, however, there are, as
+elsewhere, exceptions--Gray being perhaps one[45] as our present subject
+is another. But there are few things more interesting, though their
+interest may be somewhat tragic, than the spectacle of the way "things
+go wrong" so easily, so finally, so fatally. Fanny Kemble had a sister
+Adelaide, afterwards Mrs. Sartoris, with whom everything appears to have
+gone right: but with herself it "seemed otherwise to the Gods." And her
+letters or memoirs, or whatever they are to be called, are the record
+thereof, as well as of other things.
+
+[Sidenote: THE CARLYLES]
+
+The letters and "letter-stuff" of the Carlyles, husband and wife,
+according to the inevitable misfortune attending so much of our
+subject--supplied the occasion of volumes of that disgusting and most
+idle controversy which has made many people of taste pray that nothing
+biographical may ever be published about them. Far be it from us to take
+part in a game which if it does not always, like the unpleasant
+personage in the old ballad,
+
+    Come for ill and never for good,
+
+certainly comes for the former much oftener than for the latter purpose
+and result. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_ is--once more and as so often--the
+best and the sufficient observation. But there remains in the letters of
+both, and especially in those of the lady, plenty of wholesome interest
+and of justifiable--not spying or eavesdropping--information as to
+character. Judged comparatively, they certainly do not contradict the
+notion formerly referred to, that in some respects letter-writing is a
+specially feminine gift. Carlyle's own letters[46] have plenty of merit
+and attraction--some of the descriptive ones especially: and they
+demonstrate, in the infallible way which letters and letters alone can
+supply in the absence of long personal familiarity, that the general
+tone and key of his writings was no falsetto but a perfectly genuine
+thing--that the often urged contrast of the _Life of Schiller_, instead
+of evidencing affectation in the later work, only proves constraint in
+the earlier. At the same time, except for what may be called
+side-illustration of the works, and completion of the biography for
+those who want it, there is not very much in Carlyle's letters which
+would be a serious loss.
+
+With his wife the case is different. Without her "Letters and Memorials"
+we might (it is rather improbable that we _should_, owing to the
+misdemeanours of more persons than one and the blow-fly appetite of a
+part of the public for sore places) have escaped a good deal of the
+ignoble wrangling above referred to. But we should not only have failed
+to appreciate a very remarkable character, but have missed some of the
+very best of our now existing contributions to epistolary literature.
+Personally Mrs. Carlyle was by no means a general favourite. She had a
+fearfully sharp tongue, and a still sharper wit in directing it upon her
+victims; her experiences were not very likely to edulcorate her acids
+and mollify her asperities. The letters show that, as so often happens,
+there was plenty of sweetness within the sharp exterior, and that her
+strength was the strength of passion, not of obduracy. But this is not
+all. There might have been biographical whitewashing of this kind
+without much gain to pure literature. But the letters showed likewise a
+power of expression, both lighter and more serious, which is hardly
+inferior to that found in any correspondence of man or woman, genuine or
+fictitious. Some people, not given to rash superlatives and pretty
+extensively acquainted with literature, have held that the letter
+describing her visit after many years to Haddington, and the
+reminiscences it called forth, has no superior in the vast range of our
+subject for pure pathos perfectly expressed, without constraint on
+nature yet without loss of dignity.[47] On the other hand, the half
+comic accounts of her domestic troubles etc. are worthy of Fielding or
+Thackeray. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle possessed what is rare in
+women--humour. And she exemplified, as few other women and not so very
+many men have done, Anne Evans's matchless definition of it as "thinking
+in jest while feeling in earnest." Moreover while, as all true
+humourists can, she could drop the jest altogether when necessary, she
+could, as is the case with them likewise, never quite discard the
+earnest.
+
+[Sidenote: MACAULAY AND DICKENS]
+
+Some of the most distinguished of Carlyle's contemporaries, the great
+men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, have left letters more or
+less copious and more or less valuable from one or both of the two
+sides, biographical and literary, but not eminently so. Macaulay's
+letters and diaries suit biography excellently, and have been
+excellently used in his. They lighten and sweeten the rather boisterous
+"cocksureness" of the published writings: and help his few but very
+remarkable poems other than the _Lays_ (which are excellent but in a
+different kind) to show the soul and heart of the man as apart from his
+mere intellect. But they are not perhaps intrinsically very capital. So
+also in Dickens's case the "Life-and-Letters" system is excellently
+justified, but one does not know that the letters in themselves would
+always deserve a first class in this particular school of _Literae
+Humaniores_. Letter-writing admits--if it may not even require--a
+certain kind of egotism. But it must be what the French call an _Egoisme
+a plusieurs_--a temper which takes, if only for the moment, other people
+into itself and cares for them there. "The Inimitable" was perhaps too
+generally thinking of that Inimitable himself or of the fictitious
+creations of his marvellous genius. If, like his own Mr. Toots, he could
+have written some letters to or from _them_ it would have been a very
+different thing. In this respect he does not, as in others he does,
+resemble Balzac, whose egotism was in a way as intense as his own and
+like it extended to his creations, but could extend farther: while the
+contrast with Thackeray is even more salient than in other cases from
+this same point of view. At the same time it must not be supposed that
+there is any intention here of belittling Dickens, either as a
+letter-writer or in any other way. It is only suggested that he lacks
+one of the things necessary to perfect letter-writing. Perhaps his most
+noteworthy productions in the style are his editorial criticisms--rather
+limited in taste and purview, but singularly shrewd within other limits.
+And many of the others tell their substance with that faculty of
+"telling" which he possessed as few have ever done, while the comedy of
+those given here is "the true Dickens."
+
+[Sidenote: SOME NOVELISTS]
+
+Mention of the three greatest novelists (English and French) of the
+mid-nineteenth century naturally suggests the rest of a class so
+predominant in that century's literary production. Their record in the
+matter is rather chequered, for reasons, in some respects and cases at
+any rate, not difficult to discover. Reference is elsewhere made to the
+disappointment experienced (perhaps not too reasonably) by some readers
+of the letters of George Eliot. A not dissimilar feeling had been
+expressed earlier in regard to those of Miss Austen: which, however,
+were intrinsically far superior. Except to her sister, and it may be
+even to her, Jane Austen was not at all likely to indulge in what is
+called in French _epanchement_: it was not in the least her line,
+whether in writing for publication or otherwise. Only one full year
+passed between the death of Miss Austen and the birth of Miss Evans, and
+the two illustrated very fairly the comfortable if not invariably
+accurate idea that when one human being dies another is born to succeed
+him or her in their special functions. But, as in other respects, they
+differed here remarkably; and though in neither case was the nature of
+the writer exactly expansive, this want of expansiveness was very
+differently conditioned. Miss Austen no doubt could, if she had chosen,
+(she has done something like it as it is) have written most delightful
+letters. A hundred scenes in the novels from Catherine Morland's tremors
+and trials, or John Dashwood's progressive limitations of generosity for
+his sisters, to some of the best things in _Persuasion_, would take
+letter form with the happiest results. But she did not choose that it
+should be so. George Eliot, on the other hand, after her earlier days,
+had ensconced herself in such a chrysalis of quasi-philosophical and
+quasi-scientific thought and speech that she could hardly have recovered
+the freedom of expression which is almost the soul of letter-writing.
+
+Some of Bulwer's (the first Lord Lytton's) letters are remarkable in
+ways, especially that of literary criticism, which might hardly be
+expected by anyone who had insufficiently taken the measure of his
+strangely unequal and imperfect, yet as strangely varied, talent. But as
+the century went on a new prohibitory influence arose in the enormous
+professional production which began to be customary with
+novelists--principally tempted no doubt by the corresponding gain of
+money, but perhaps also by the nobler desire of increasing, or at least
+living up to, their reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery
+which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time,
+to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to
+morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year--and
+those not the cock-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the
+old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions--could leave little time or
+inclination for extensive letter-writing. There were, however, some
+exceptions. Charles Kingsley--who, though his novels were not very
+numerous, supplemented them with all sorts of miscellaneous writing for
+publication, was a diligent sportsman, an active cleric, and a busy man
+in many kinds and ways--wrote certainly good and probably many letters.
+The two brighter stars in the Bronte constellation, especially
+Charlotte, were scarcely less remarkable with the pen in this way than
+in others: and Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte's biographer, has been put high
+by some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade showed itself
+here as elsewhere[48]: and others might be mentioned.[49] But perhaps
+the most distinguished novelist next to Thackeray of the nineteenth
+century, who was also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who
+died in middle age not long before its end--Robert Louis Stevenson.
+
+[Sidenote: STEVENSON]
+
+Stevenson had in fact practically all the qualifications necessary for a
+good practitioner of our art. He had, eminently, that gift which the
+Romans called _facundia_ and the French can translate, if with a slight
+degradation of meaning, by _faconde_; but for which we, though the
+adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess no noun,
+"Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine" writing or speaking.
+"Facility of expression" perhaps comes nearest. Whether he corrected or
+corrupted this native gift by his famous "sedulous aping" of stylists
+before him is a debated question: but one quite unnecessary to touch
+here. It is sufficient to say that he never aped anyone in his letters,
+unless playfully and in a sort of concert with his correspondent. Indeed
+he possessed, quintessentially, that "naturalness" of matter and form on
+which so much stress has been laid. He had a disposition equally
+favourable to the business--if business we may call it. A person who is
+habitually gloomy may write capital letters of an impressive character
+now and then: but is likely to produce little but boredom if he extends
+his practice. Louis Stevenson did not habitually "regard the world
+through a horse collar" (as it was once put), but he certainly did not
+pass through it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his
+eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes under no small
+difficulties, he had very little if any of that _collar_-work--that
+grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of
+all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of
+scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without
+being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will,"
+and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to _get_ out
+of ruts, _kept_ out of them without the least trouble. He was as little
+of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a
+drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good
+letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold
+his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great
+pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his
+to myself as a sort of _bonus_ to the reader of this little book--a
+letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other respects.
+
+At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed had best, stop:
+not merely because space is closing in. Lovers of letters will of course
+detect what seem to them omissions in what has gone before and what
+comes after. Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
+Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon and
+Newman--the latter not merely for his re-statement of the
+character-value of correspondence, but for his exemplifications of
+it--might certainly have been more fully noticed. But in regard to later
+writers there are several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be
+easy to speak on account of their own lives being too recent: in regard
+of nearly all the same fact must have occasioned exercise of
+"censorship" to a degree which makes absolute judgment of their
+competence as epistolers rash, and comparative judgment almost
+impossible. To take up once more one example of men who were born a full
+or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,[50] speaking apparently with
+intimate knowledge of the originals, speaks also of the "severe process
+of excision and retrenchment to which these [_the letters of Mr. Matthew
+Arnold_] have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters "could
+have endured" it. Those who remember the appearance of these letters
+will also remember that some critics doubted whether even "these" had
+exactly "endured it"--that is to say, whether the expected salt of the
+author of so much published _persiflage_ had not been left out or had
+singularly lost its savour. To take another from the next generation, it
+is pretty certain that Mr. Swinburne's letters, though we have judicious
+selections from them, must have needed much more excision or
+retrenchment than Mr. Arnold's, unless he wrote them in a manner
+remarkably different both from his conversation and from his published
+works. In such cases it is best, the evidence being not fully before us,
+not to anticipate either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER
+
+
+A few more general remarks, however, on _kinds_ of letter-writing--as
+distinguished from personality and accomplishment of letter-writers--may
+not improperly be added.
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS AND THE NOVEL]
+
+One extremely curious application of the Letter has not yet been
+noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is the way in which--when
+after birth-struggles for some two thousand years the novel at last got
+itself born--letter-writing was pressed into its service. Historically,
+as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may connect
+Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest the connection as the
+origin of the "novel-in-letters." In the romance proper--that is to say
+that of the Middle Ages--letters do not play any very important part,
+just as they played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the
+late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries they play a
+much larger--partly no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of
+the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency
+and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need
+not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in
+seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form:
+nor need we even put down to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well
+as at home, the very general further adoption and continuance of a form
+which has perhaps more to be said against it than for it. Most serious
+students of the history of prose fiction must have noticed, and some of
+them have already pointed out, the curious, rather naif, but quite
+obvious feeling on the part of the earlier practitioners of such fiction
+that somebody might ask them, in more polite language than that in which
+Cardinal Ippolito d'Este asked Ariosto a similar question, "Where they
+got their stories from?" The feeling seems sometimes to have affected
+poets, but much more rarely: the Muse being allowed to possess and
+confer a certain immunity from such cross-examination. Of the
+unnecessary and sometimes unnatural devices invented to answer this
+inconvenient question Scott in one well-known passage,[51] and others
+elsewhere, have made ironic lists: and not the least characteristic of
+Miss Austen's satiric touches is the passage where Catherine Morland
+expects palpitating interest from a bundle of washing-bills in a
+wardrobe-cupboard. But the anticipation of such a question, though
+perhaps it became conventional before it disappeared altogether, was
+certainly at one time real.
+
+At any rate, helped by the example of Richardson--Father of English
+novels as he is with whatever justice called--and by that overmastering
+fancy for letter-writing itself, which, as should have been already made
+clear, affected the century in which English novels were born--the
+practice spread and held its ground. Fielding was too perfect an artist
+in the higher and purer kind of fiction to favour it: and though Sterne
+himself was a sufficiently characteristic letter-writer, the form would
+not have suited the peculiar eccentricity of his two novels. But
+Smollett's best, _Humphrey Clinker_, adopts the method, and is perhaps
+one of its most successful examples. It suited the author's preference
+for a succession of scenes rather than a connected plot; for the sharp
+presentation of "humours" in character and incident. And it continued to
+be practised both early in the nineteenth century--examples had swarmed
+at the end of the eighteenth--and later. _Redgauntlet_ (which some have
+thought one of the best of Scott's novels and which few good judges
+would put much lower) is written in it to a great extent, but not
+wholly. And it may be noticed that this combination of Letters and
+narrative, which came in pretty early, is rather tell-tale. It is a sort
+of confession of what certainly is the fact--that the novel entirely by
+letters is a clumsy device, constantly getting in the way of the
+"story." Indeed the method of _Redgauntlet_ is a kind of retreat to the
+elder and more modern--one may say the more artistic and rational--plan
+of _introducing_ letters, but only occasionally as auxiliaries to, and
+as it were illustrations of, the actual narrative, not as substitutes
+for, or at any rate main constituents of, it.[52] Indeed, in order to
+make a novel wholly composed of letters thoroughly and absorbingly
+attractive, either charm of style such as to make the kind of literature
+in which it appears, more or less indifferent; or passion which is more
+suitable to poetry or drama than to prose; or both, may seem
+unnecessary.
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS AND BIOGRAPHY]
+
+It was also in the eighteenth century--_the_ century once more of
+letter-writing--that letters, this time genuine not fictitious, began
+to play, to an important extent, a subsidiary part in yet another
+department of literature--biography. They had always done so, of course,
+to an extent less important in History, of which Biography is really a
+subdivision. The truth expressed in that dictum of the pseudo-Demetrius
+quoted above as to the illuminative power of letters on character could
+be missed by no historian and by no biographer who had his wits about
+him--even if he had less striking examples at hand than that letter of
+the Emperor Tiberius to the Senate which is one of the Tacitean flashes
+of lightning through the dark of history. But the credit of using
+letters as a main constituent of biography--of originating the
+"Life-and-Letters" class of books which fills so large a part of modern
+library-shelves--has been given, as far as English is concerned, to
+Mason in his dealings with Gray. There is so little to be said in favour
+of Mason, that we need not enquire too narrowly into his right to this
+commendation: though critical conscience must be appeased by adding that
+he abused his privilege as an editor and "literary executor" by garbling
+unblushingly. Boswell did Mason honour by acknowledging his example, and
+much more also by following it; and this practically settled the matter.
+Except in short pieces, which had need be of special excellence like
+Carlyle's _Sterling_, the plan has always been followed since: and there
+can here at least be no question that with a little favour of
+circumstances, it is the best plan possible. You get, as has been said,
+your character at first hand; if the letters include epistles to as well
+as from him or her, you get invaluable side-lights; you get, except in
+cases of wilful deception or great carelessness, the most trustworthy
+accounts of fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the man
+talking.
+
+At the same time it must be admitted that this "Life-and-Letters"
+scheme, like every kind of art, requires care: and like most human
+things, is exposed to dangers and difficulties in addition to some
+previously noticed. To begin with, the _quality_ of the letters has to
+be considered. It so happened that Mason, the originator by courtesy,
+had unusually good material to work with. Gray, as is above pointed out
+and as is also, with some provisos already made or very soon to be made,
+universally admitted, is one of our best letter-writers. But not
+everybody--not every considerable man or woman of letters even--can
+write good letters.
+
+And besides this--besides the temptation to rely on the letters and
+merely to print them whether they deserve it or not--there is the
+further difficulty--to judge by the scarcity of good biographies a very
+great and insistent one--of composing the framework of the biography
+itself so as to suit the letters--to give the apples of gold in a
+picture not too obviously composed of some metal baser than silver.
+Unless this is done it would be better simply to "calendar" the letters
+themselves, with the barest schedule of dates and facts to assist the
+comprehension of them. But to consider the different methods of doing
+this--still more of presenting letters apart from deliberate
+biographical intention--would lead us too far. Carlyle's _Cromwell_--the
+presentation of an extraordinarily difficult set of documents not merely
+with connecting narrative, but with a complete explanatory commentary
+including paraphrase, is as remarkable an achievement as, and a far more
+elaborate one than, his _Sterling_ in the way of biography pure and
+simple. It is perhaps, though less delectable, not less admirable in its
+style than the other in its own. But it has, of course, the drawback of
+carrying with it a distinctly controversial character and, indeed,
+intention. We have more recently had at least two examples of the
+fullest possible comment with the least possible controversy in Mr.
+Tovey's "Gray," and of less voluminous but excellently adequate editing
+in Mrs. Toynbee's "Walpole."
+
+[Sidenote: "LETTERS FROM UNKNOWNS"]
+
+One not very large, but extremely curious division of letter-writing
+closely connected with those most recently mentioned, invites if it does
+not insist upon a word or two. Many people--almost all who have happened
+to be at any time "in the lime-light" as a modern phrase goes--that is
+to say in positions of publicity--must have had experience of the
+strange appetite of their fellow-creatures for writing them letters
+without previous acquaintance, without excuse of introduction, and on
+the most flimsy pretexts of occasion. The present writer once received
+from Australia a long list of queries on a book of his--most if not all
+of which could have been answered from the ordinary reference-bookshelf
+in the writing-room of such a club as that--never mind whether it was in
+Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide--from which the querist dated his
+epistle. Indeed, on another occasion somebody demanded a catalogue of
+"the important references to the medical profession in French
+literature"! This tendency of humanity sometimes exercises and magnifies
+itself into really remarkable correspondences. There is perhaps none
+such in English quite to match those _Lettres a une Inconnue_ which
+(after standing the brunt of not a little unfavourable criticism,
+provoked not so much by their contents as by the personal, political,
+and above all religious or anti-religious idiosyncrasy of their author,
+Prosper Merimee) have taken their place, for good and all, among the
+classics of the art. Our most curious example perhaps is to be found in
+the _Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Miss J._, the genuineness of
+which has been a matter of some controversy, but which are rather more
+inexplicable as forgeries than as authentic documents. Authors, from
+Richardson onwards, have been the special targets of such
+correspondents: and romance reports some, perhaps even history might
+accept a few, instances of the closest relations resulting. On the other
+hand, one of the very best of Miss Edgeworth's too much neglected
+stories, "L'Amie Inconnue" not only may be useful as a warning to the
+too open-hearted but has probably had not a few parallels in fact.
+Generally, of course, the uninvited correspondent is merely a passing
+phenomenon--rarely perhaps welcome except to persons of very much
+self-centred temperament with a good deal of time on their hands;
+tolerated and choked off placably by the good-natured and well-mannered;
+answered snappishly or not answered at all by moroser victims.
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE LETTERS]
+
+There is yet a kind of letter, fictitious or real examples whereof are
+not usually given in books which (as the Articles say of the Apocrypha)
+are to be read "for example of life and instruction of manners," though
+it is in a way the most interesting of all; and that is the love-letter.
+It is, however, so varied in kind and not so very seldom so pre-eminent
+as an illustration of the epistolary ideal--"writing as you would
+talk"--that it would be absurd to say nothing about it in this
+Introduction, and that it may even be possible to give some examples of
+it--one such of Swift's must be given--in the text. Of those which, as
+it was said of one famous group (those of Mlle. de Lespinasse) "burn the
+paper," those of which the Abelard and Heloise collection, with those of
+"The Portuguese Nun," Maria Alcoforado, and Julie de Lespinasse herself
+are the most universally famous--we have two pretty recent collections
+in English from two of the greatest poets and one of the greatest
+poetesses in English of the nineteenth century. They are the letters,
+referred to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the Brownings
+to each other.
+
+There are, it is to be hoped, few people who read such letters (unless
+they are of such a date that Time has exercised his strange power of
+resanctifying desecration and making private property public) without an
+unpleasant consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is another class
+which is not exposed to any such disagreeable liability: and that is the
+very large proportion of love-letters where the amativeness is, so to
+speak, more or less concealed, or where, though scarcely covered with
+the thinnest veil, it is mixed with jest sometimes, jest rather on the
+wrong side of the mouth, perhaps, but jest exercising its usual power of
+embalming. (Salt and sugar both preserve: but in this particular
+instance the danger is of oversweetness already.) There can--or perhaps
+we should say there could, but for some differences of opinion worth
+attending to--be no doubt that Swift owes much to this mixture: and if
+anybody ever undertook a large collection of the best private
+love-letters he would probably find the same seasoning in the best of
+them. For examples in which the actual amatory element is present but as
+it were under-current, like blood that flushes a cheek but does not
+show outside it, some of the best examples are those of Scott to Lady
+Abercorn. Those recently published, and already glanced at, of Disraeli
+to various ladies would seem to be more demonstrative and more
+histrionic. But the section as admitted lies, for us, on the extreme
+border of our province. It is too important to be wholly omitted and
+therefore these paragraphs have been given to it. And it may require
+future touching in reference to some particular writers, especially that
+greatest and most unhappy of all Deans of Saint Patrick, the greatest
+perhaps of all Deans that ever were with the exception of John
+Donne--himself no small epistoler, but greatest in those verse-letters
+which are denied us.[53]
+
+It is perhaps superfluous, but for completeness' sake may be
+permissible, to say a very little about the use of letters for purposes
+other than that of genuine personal communication. Indeed in doing so we
+are only executing the time-honoured manoeuvre of returning to the point
+whence we set out, and bringing the wheel full circle.[54] The strictly
+"business" letter--which is, of course, a personal communication in a
+way--and the "despatch" which is a form of it intended sooner or later
+for more general information, require no notice or at best mere mention.
+But in times past if not also in those present, "Letters" have been
+used--specially perhaps in that century of letters, the eighteenth--for
+purposes of definite instruction, argument, propaganda and so forth.
+There are obvious advantages in the form for certain of the lighter of
+these purposes as it is used in Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_ or
+Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_. But why Bishop Hurd's _Letters on
+Chivalry and Romance_ (really valuable as they are) should have been
+"Letters" at all, except for fashion's sake, it is difficult to say.
+There is perhaps more excuse for the pamphlet, especially the political
+pamphlet, assuming the title of letter as it has so often done in
+instances from the great example of Bolingbroke and Burke downwards.[55]
+You have, with less unreality, the advantage of the classical "speech"
+addressed often to a single person, who is supposed to be specially
+aware of the facts or specially to need instruction and encouragement,
+or modified remonstrance, as to them. It was probably from these great
+exemplars--perhaps also aided by the custom of eighteenth century
+periodicals, that pamphlets of all kinds became titular epistles such as
+"A Letter to the deputy-manager of a Theatre Royal, London, on his
+lately acquired notoriety in contriving and arranging the 'Hair Powder
+Act'" (but this was satire), or "A letter writ by a clergyman to his
+neighbour concerning the kingdom and the allegiance due to the King and
+Queen."[56]
+
+[Sidenote: LETTERS TO THE PAPERS]
+
+For a last class may be taken the ever increasing body of things
+"written to the papers." It is unnecessary to consider the justice of a
+sarcastic division of mankind into "those who write to the papers and
+those who do not read the letters," or to discuss what men have been
+heard to say--that the people who write _to_ papers are people who have
+not written _in_ them. It is quite certain that, for many years past,
+the less frivolous kind of newspaper-correspondence has been of admitted
+interest and importance; indeed a paper might conceivably maintain its
+position after its repute has sunk in other ways, simply because more
+letters of importance appear in it than in others. As a source of
+illustrations of how to write and how not to write letters this modern
+development of the art could hardly be quite neglected; and it offers a
+curious study of various kinds. Except with very guileless writers the
+character-index quality is of course less certainly present than in
+letters written _not_ for publication. A man must be, in the old Greek
+phrase, "either a God or a beast," if he does not prepare for print--if
+not exactly with a touch of "stage-fright," at any rate with the
+premeditation with which even stage-fright-free actors go on the stage.
+But it requires a great master or mistress of dissimulation to write
+even these letters at all frequently without a certain amount of
+self-revelation. And there is perhaps no more curious and interesting
+part of that most curious and interesting business of editing than
+(when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered correspondence.
+There is the pure lunatic, such as the man who for years sends
+despatches in a sort of cuneiform cipher, probably quite meaningless and
+certainly not likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive
+person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter quoted above) gives
+his opinion of your paper; the volunteer-corrector of obvious misprints;
+the innocent who merely wants to see his own signature in print, and who
+generally tries to bribe his way into it by references to "your powerful
+journal," etc. They are all there--waiting for the waste-paper basket.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+A few more general remarks may close this Introduction. Something on the
+Art of Letter-writing and also something on its history, especially in
+English, was promised. It is hoped that the promise has not been too
+much falsified, at least to the extent necessary for illustration and
+understanding of the specimens which should follow, and which in their
+turn should illustrate it and make it more intelligible. The History
+part requires little or no postscript; whether ill or well done it
+should pretty well speak for itself. What touches the Art may require
+certain cautions and provisos.
+
+This is especially the case with regard to the stress laid above on
+"naturalness." It is (as the present writer at least believes) the very
+passport of admission to the company of good letter-writers. But it must
+not be misconstrued. It is quite possible that too little care may be
+taken with the matter and style of letters. After all they
+correspond--in a certain, if in the most limited degree--to appearance
+"in company," and require as that does a certain etiquette of
+observance. Complete deshabille[57] on paper is not attractive: and
+there are letters (it is unnecessary to specify any particular
+examples) which somewhat exaggerate "simplicity."
+
+Cowper is perhaps the accepted classic in this style who has the least
+of _apparatus_: but even Cowper bestows a certain amount of
+care--indeed, a very considerable amount--on the dress of his letter's
+body, on the cookery of its provender. If you have only small beer to
+chronicle you can at the worst draw it and froth it and pour it out with
+some gesture. In this respect as in others, while letter-writing has not
+been inaccurately defined or described as the closest to conversation of
+literary forms that do not actually reproduce conversation itself, it
+remains apart from conversation and subject to an additional degree of
+discipline.
+
+[Sidenote: CONCLUSION]
+
+Enough should have been said earlier of the opposite fault by excess of
+dressing, which has, however, for a sort of solace the fact that it may
+pass as literature though not exactly as letter-writing. Actually
+beautiful style--not machine-made "fine writing," but that embodiment of
+thought which is a special incarnation of it--is the one thing secure of
+success and survival, whatever literary form it takes. And even short of
+this supreme beauty accomplished literary manner can never be quite
+unwelcome. The highest place in letter-writing has been refused here to
+Pope: and unfortunately there is hardly a division of his work which,
+when you know a little more about it and him, excites more disgust at
+the man's nature. But, at the same time, hardly even his verse convinces
+one more of that extraordinary power of expression as he wished to
+express things which this Alexander, in some ways the infinitely
+Little, possessed. Yet it gives in the first place a rather
+sophisticated enjoyment, open only to those whom the gods have made, or
+who have made themselves, critical. And in the second, whether
+sophisticated or not, what it gives is the enjoyment of literature not
+of life:[58] whereas the direct satisfaction which genuine letters
+afford is almost identical with that given by actual intercourse with
+other human beings. However, it is unnecessary to "go on refining."
+
+Perhaps indeed, after all, the artificial letters may be permitted if
+only in an "utmost, last, provincial band," to add to the muster of
+pleasure-giving things which epistolary literature so amply provides.
+Even fiction itself, which, as has been said often, draws on this
+source, cannot supply anything more "pastimeous"; even drama anything
+more arresting to the attention. Indeed good letters may be said to be
+constantly presenting little stories, little dramas, little
+pictures--all of them sometimes not so _very_ little--which are now
+practically complete; now easily filled up by any reasonable
+intelligence; now perhaps tantalizingly, but all the more interestingly
+enigmatic. For those people (one may or may not sympathise with them,
+but they are certainly pretty numerous) who cannot take interest or can
+only take a reduced interest in things that "did not really happen";
+letters may be even more interesting than novels. Only to very wayward
+or very unimaginative ones can they be less so, if they are in any
+respect good of their kind.
+
+One of their main attractions is, with the same caution, their
+remarkable _variety_. It has been complained with a certain amount of
+truth that fiction, whether in prose or verse, is a little apt to fall
+into grooves: that all the histories are told, all the plays acted. This
+is undoubtedly the curse of Art, and every now and then we see it
+acknowledged in the most convincing manner by the frantic efforts made
+to be "different." But that real things and persons are never quite
+identical is not merely a philosophical doctrine but a practical fact.
+The "two peas" of one saying are never so much "alike" as the "two
+blades of grass" of another are unlike.
+
+Now as letters--that is to say letters that deserve to exist at all--are
+bound to reproduce the personality of their writers, it will follow that
+a refreshing diversity must also belong to them. And as a matter of fact
+this will be found to be the case. Even the eighteenth century--the
+century of rule and class, of objection to "the streaks of the tulip,"
+of machine-made verse, etc.,--has, except in the case of letters
+artificially made to pattern, shown this signally.
+
+One last recommendation. A bad letter-writer is sure to betray himself
+almost everywhere, and letters are as a rule short. Most people must
+have attempted books of other classes, especially novels, and hoping
+against hope turned them over, and dipped and peeped till repeated
+disappointment compelled the traditional flinging to the other end of
+the room, or simply dropping the thing in less explosive weariness. You
+never need do that with letters. If a man's letters are not worth
+reading you will "have a confessing criminal" at once; if they are he
+will hardly be able to keep the quality latent whenever he goes beyond
+the shortest business note. The man of one book, in the sense of having
+read it, is proverbially formidable but in fact too frequently a bore.
+The man of one letter, in the sense of having written a good one and no
+more, probably never existed.[59]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION
+
+
+I
+
+GREEK LETTERS.--SYNESIUS (_c._ 375-430)
+
+     English readers may know something, from Kingsley's
+     _Hypatia_, of the excellent bishop of Ptolemais who, at the
+     meeting of the fourth and fifth centuries, combined the
+     functions of neo-Platonist philosopher, Christian prelate,
+     country gentleman, and most efficient yeomanry officer
+     against the ancestors, or at least forerunners, of the
+     present Senussi, who were constantly raiding his diocese and
+     its neighbourhood. These two letters--to Hypatia herself and
+     to his brother--show him in different, but in each case
+     favourable lights.
+
+
+LETTER CVIII. (TO HIS BROTHER)
+
+I have already got 300 spears and as many cutlasses, though I had, even
+before, only half a score two-edged swords: and these long flat blades
+are not forged with us. But I think the cutlasses can be struck more
+vigorously into the enemies' bodies, and so we shall use them. And at
+need we shall have bludgeons--for the wild olive trees are good with
+us.[60] Some of our men have single-bladed axes at their belts with
+which those of us who have no defensive armour shall chop their[61]
+shields and make them fight on equal terms. The fight will, at a guess,
+come off to-morrow: for when some of the foe had fallen in with scouts
+of ours and pursuing them at their best speed had found them too good to
+catch, they bade them tell us what pleased us mightily--if indeed we may
+no more have to wander in the footsteps of those fellows who made off
+into the wastes of the interior. For they said they were going to stay
+where they were and wanted to find out what sort of fellows _we_ were,
+who dared to separate ourselves so many days' journey from our own place
+that we might fight with men of war, nomads in way of life, and whose
+civil polity was like our discipline in war-time. Therefore, as one who
+by God's help shall to-morrow conquer--nay, conquer again if needful
+(for I would say nothing of bad omen) I commit to thee the care of my
+children: for it is fitting that thou, their uncle, shouldest carry over
+thine affection to them.
+
+
+LETTER CXXIV
+
+"But if oblivion be the lot of the dead in Hades yet will _I_, even
+there, remember" my dear Hypatia. Beset as I am by the sufferings of my
+country, and sick, as I see daily weapons of war about me and men
+slaughtered like altar-victims; drawing as I do breath infected by
+rotting corpses; expecting myself a similar fate, (for who can be
+hopeful when the very atmosphere is weighed down and dusky with the
+shadow of carnivorous birds?) yet do I cling to my country. For what
+else would my feeling be, born and bred as I am, and with the not
+ignoble tombs of my fathers before my eyes? For thee alone does it seem
+to me that I could neglect my country, and if I could get leisure, force
+myself to run away.[62]
+
+
+LATIN LETTERS.--PLINY (62-114)
+
+     The most famous letters of the younger Pliny are those which
+     describe his country houses, that which gives account of his
+     uncle's death in the great eruption of Vesuvius, and his
+     correspondence with Trajan. But the first mentioned are
+     rather long and require a good deal of technical
+     annotation;[63] the second is to be found in many books; and
+     the letters which make up the third (except those concerning
+     Christianity, which are again to be found in many places)
+     are mostly short and on points of business merely. The one I
+     have chosen is extremely characteristic, in two respects, of
+     the author and of Roman ways generally. It shows Pliny's
+     good-nature and right feeling, but it shows also a certain
+     "priggishness" with which he has been specially and
+     personally charged, but which, to speak frankly, he shared
+     with a great many of his famous countrymen. Priggishness was
+     almost unknown among the Greeks--though one may suspect its
+     presence among those Spartans who have told so few tales of
+     themselves. But it flourished at Rome, and was one of
+     Rome's many--and one of her worst--legacies to us moderns.
+     Secondly, the letter is amusing because one thinks what an
+     English judge would surely think and would probably say, if
+     counsel for a lady were to inform the court _uberius et
+     latius_ what an extremely good opinion that lady's father
+     had of him, the learned speaker. A minor but still
+     interesting difference is in Pliny's slight hesitation about
+     taking a brief against a consul-elect. The subtleties of
+     Roman etiquette are endless.
+
+
+PLINIUS TO HIS ASINIUS GALLUS--HEALTH
+
+You both advise[64] and ask me to take up the cause of Corellia in her
+absence against C. Caecilius, Consul elect. I am obliged to you for
+advising me but I complain of your _asking_. I ought to be advised that
+I may know the fact, but not asked to do what it would be most
+disgraceful for me _not_ to do. Could I doubt about protecting the
+daughter of Corellius? True, there is between me and him against whom
+you call on me, not exactly close friendship but still some friendship.
+There is also to be taken into account the man's worth and the honour to
+which he is destined, a thing which I ought to hold in the greater
+respect that I have myself already enjoyed it. For it is natural that
+things which one has oneself attained, one should wish to be regarded
+with the greatest respect. But when I think that I am to help Corellius'
+daughter, all this appears idle and empty. I seem to see the man than
+whom our age had no one more dignified, more pious, of an acuter mind;
+the man whom, when I had begun to like him out of admiration I admired
+more, contrary to what usually happens, the more thoroughly I knew him.
+For I did know him thoroughly; he kept nothing hid from me, neither
+jocular nor serious, neither sad nor glad. I was quite a young man: but
+already he held me in honour and I will dare to say respect--as if I
+were his contemporary. He gave me his vote and interest in my standings
+for honours; he, when I entered upon them, was my introducer and
+companion; when I carried them out, my adviser and guide. In fact, in
+every business of mine, though he was an old man and in weak health, he
+was as forward as if he were young and strong. How much he furthered my
+reputation, privately, publicly, and even with the Chief of the State!
+For when by chance, in the presence of the Emperor Nerva, the
+conversation had turned on young men of worth, and several persons spoke
+in praise of me, he kept silence for a little, which gave him the more
+authority. Then in the weighty manner you know, "I must needs," he said,
+"say all the less about Secundus[65] because he never does anything but
+by my advice." By saying this he gave me the credit (which it would have
+been extravagant in me to hope for) of never doing anything in other
+than the wisest way, seeing that I always acted on the advice of the
+wisest man. Moreover, when dying, he said to his daughter, as she is
+wont to declare, "I have provided you, as if I were myself to live
+longer, many friends: but for the chief of them Secundus and Cornutus."
+Now when I remember this, I see I must take care not in any way to
+disappoint the trust in me of this most fore-thoughtful man. Therefore I
+will come to Corellia's help without the least delay and will not refuse
+to undergo inconveniences: though I think I shall secure not merely
+pardon but even praise from the very person who as you say is bringing
+a new action as against a woman, if it should happen to me to say these
+same things in court more amply and fully than the narrow room of a
+letter permits, either to excuse or indeed commend myself. Farewell.
+
+
+LETTER OF THE "DARK" AGES
+
+SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS (431?-482-4)
+
+     Caius Sollius Sidonius Apollinaris is one of the most
+     interesting figures of the troubled and obscure period
+     intervening between the fall of the Roman Empire _proper_
+     and the rise of mediaeval Europe. He was born at Lyons,
+     married Papianilla, daughter of Flavius Avitus, who was to
+     be one of the ephemeral "Emperors" of the West and the
+     Decadence, but was not injured by his father-in-law's
+     dethronement, and enjoyed various civil honours and posts.
+     In 471, though a married layman, he was peremptorily made a
+     bishop, and accordingly took orders, put away his wife, and
+     discharged his sacred duties as creditably as he had
+     discharged his profane ones. Sidonius was a not contemptible
+     poet, and an interesting letter-writer. Like most literary
+     men of his class he was given to what we call flattery; and
+     this Ecdicius, of whom he made a sort of Dark Age Admirable
+     Crichton, was his brother-in-law, an Emperor's son, and
+     Count or Duke (the titles were often interchangeable) of the
+     district. But it is fair to say that Gregory of Tours, the
+     accepted historian of the period, and living only in the
+     next century, makes the exploit over the Goths even more
+     signal--for he reduces the troopers to _ten_. The Arverni
+     (inhabitants of Auvergne and its neighbourhood) were the
+     strongest tribe in Southern Gaul when the Romans first came
+     into contact with them, retained much prominence in Caesar's
+     time, and had not lost individuality, if they had lost
+     independence, by this (5th) century. The mixture of "Arms"
+     and the "Gown" is noteworthy.
+
+
+BOOK III. LETTER III
+
+SIDONIUS TO HIS ECDICIUS--HEALTH
+
+If ever, now you are longed for by my Arvernians, whose love for you
+subdues them remarkably, and indeed for all sorts of reasons. First,
+because a man's native land has the greatest part in creating affection
+for him.[66] Then, because in your time you are about the only mortal
+who was longed for before his birth as much as he was rejoiced in after
+it.... I say nothing of such things--common to all, but no mean
+incitement to affection--as that you crawled as a child on the same turf
+with them. I pass over the grass which you first trod, the river you
+first swam, the woods you broke through in hunting. I leave out the fact
+that it was here you first played ball[67] and backgammon,[68] that you
+hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the bow. I omit the fact that for the
+sake of your boyish presence students of letters came hither from all
+parts; and that it was due to you as an individual that our nobility,
+anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech, imbued itself now with the
+style of oratory, now with the measures of the Muse. And this specially
+kindled the love of the community[69] that you forbade those whom you
+had already made Latins[70] to remain barbarians.[71] For it could never
+slip the memory of our citizens what and how great you seemed, to every
+age and rank and sex on the half-ruined mounds of our walls, when,
+accompanied by scarcely eighteen horsemen, you cut your way through some
+thousands of Goths in full daylight and (which posterity will hardly
+believe) in the open field. A well trained army stood aghast at the
+sound of your name and the sight of your person: so that the leaders of
+the enemy, in their astonishment, hardly knew how many were their
+followers, how few yours. Their line was then withdrawn to the brow of a
+steep hill; it had before been gathered together to storm, but on your
+appearance was not deployed for battle. Meanwhile you, having slain some
+of their best men whom not sloth but courage had made the rearmost of
+the troop, occupied the level ground alone, though such a fight gave you
+not so many comrades as your table is wont to contain guests. And when
+you returned to the town at your leisure what came to meet you in the
+way of official compliments, applause, tears, rejoicings can be better
+guessed than described. One might see in the crammed halls of the
+spacious palace that happy ovation for your thronged return. Some caught
+up the dust of your footsteps to kiss it: others took out the horses'
+curbs stained with blood and foam; others prepared the stands for the
+saddles drenched with the horses' sweat; others, when you were about to
+put off your helmet, unbuckled the clasps of its plated chin-straps, or
+busied themselves with unlacing your greaves. Yet others counted the
+notches on the swords, blunted with slaughter, or measured with
+livid[72] fingers the rings of the corslets, slashed or pierced by
+weapons.[73]
+
+
+EARLY MEDIAEVAL LETTER (TWELFTH CENTURY)
+
+     Of the other persons mentioned in this letter besides the
+     widowed Duchess and King Louis VII., the first is Ralph,
+     Count of (Peronne and) Vermandois, a leper. The lady's name
+     was Eleanor, and she also was probably a widow; the
+     Duchess's son Hugh was third of that name as Duke of
+     Burgundy. Ivo, Count of Soissons, was the guardian of the
+     Count of Vermandois, incapacitated legally by his plague.
+     The proposed marriage did not come off. The business-like
+     tone of the letter will only surprise those who do not
+     really know the "Ages of Romance." I owe the selection of it
+     to my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., who came to my aid
+     in the dearth of books of this period which circumstances
+     imposed on me.
+
+To Louis[74] most excellent King of the Franks by the grace of God, and
+her most beloved Lord, Mary, Duchess of Burgundy--health and due
+respect. It is known to your Majesty that my son is your liegeman, and,
+if it please you, your kinsman also. Whatsoever he can do is yours: and
+if he could do more it were yours. And so I all the more confidently ask
+your highest affection for my son. For it has been told me that Count
+Ralph of Peronne has a certain marriageable sister who, as has been
+reported to me and her own people, would be a suitable wife for my son.
+For this reason, most beloved Lord, I and he ask that you would look to
+this matter yourself and speak about it to the Count of Soissons, and
+settle how this marriage may be contracted. You must know that though my
+son might marry in another kingdom, I greatly prefer that he should
+take a wife in yours, rather than in any other. The nearer he becomes
+connected with you the more will he be yours and altogether a profit to
+you.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] It may of course be "illustrated" in the other sense by a second use
+of the pen; and we shall have instances of this kind to notice.
+
+[2] As has often been pointed out Ben Jonson's exquisite "Drink to me
+only with thine eyes" is a verse-paraphrase or mosaic from this writer's
+prose.
+
+[3] Pliny, if he did not always "write for publication," deliberately
+"published," as we should say, his letters. Indeed, he is one of the
+first to use the word in this sense, even if he uses it immediately of
+an oration not a letter. Some think Cicero meant publication; and he was
+very likely to do so.
+
+[4] The Latin statesman, like the Greek bishop, condescends to write
+about wine and even more fully. One of the most interesting and
+informing things on the subject is his discourse on _vinum acinaticium_,
+a sort of Roman Imperial Tokay made from grapes kept till the frost had
+touched them.
+
+[5] Genuine letters of Sappho would have been of the first interest to
+compare with those of Heloise, and the "Portuguese Nun" and Mademoiselle
+de Lespinasse. Diotima's might have been as disappointing as George
+Eliot's: but by no means must necessarily have been so. Aspasia's,
+sometimes counterfeited, ought to have been good.
+
+[6] It is part of the plan to give, as a sort of Appendix to the
+Introduction, and extension of it towards the main body of text, some
+specimens of Greek, Roman (classical and post-classical) and Early
+Mediaeval letter-writing, translated for the purpose by the present
+writer. The _continuity_ of literary history is a thing which deserves
+to be attended to, especially when there is an ever-growing tendency to
+confine attention to things modern--albeit so soon to be antiquated! I
+owe the last of these specimens, in the Latin from which I translate it,
+to the kindness of my friend the Rev. W. Hunt, D.Litt., to whom I had
+recourse as not myself having access to a large library at the moment,
+and who has assisted me in other parts of this book.
+
+[7] Yet others, as to authenticity, have, I believe, been rejected by
+all competent scholarship.
+
+[8] Benjamin Constant and Madame de Charriere.
+
+[9] Some of us think Blake a great poet; but this is scarcely a general
+opinion, and he does not appear till the century was three parts over.
+Burns (whose own letters by the way do him little justice) hardly comes
+in.
+
+[10] Especially the most popular and voluminous if not the most
+important of all--the periodical and the novel.
+
+[11] The danger being of many sorts--usually in the direction of various
+kinds of _excess_. A _quietly_ tragic letter may be a masterpiece:
+perhaps there is no finer example than one to be again referred to, of
+Mrs. Carlyle's.
+
+[12] Mr. Paul thinks that "the baby language" is terribly out of
+character, and that there is "too much of it"; that Swift "would try to
+make love though he did not know what love meant"; and that the whole
+rings hollow and insincere. Others, women as well as men, have held that
+the "little language" is only less pathetic than it is charming; that
+Swift was one of the greatest, if one of the unhappiest lovers of the
+world; and that the thing is as sincere as if it had been written in the
+Palace of Truth and only hollow as is the space between Heaven and Hell.
+
+[13] It should never be, but perhaps sometimes is, forgotten that
+"Stella" was a lady of unusual wits, and of what Swift's greatest
+decrier called in his own protegee Mrs. Williams "universal curiosity,"
+that is to say not "inquisitiveness" but "intelligent interest." The
+politics etc. are not mere selfish attention to what interests the
+writer only.
+
+[14] It must not be forgotten that she was Fielding's cousin. And after
+the remark above on Swift it is pleasant and may be fair to say that Mr.
+Paul is a hearty "Marian."
+
+[15] Johnson is again the chief and by no means trustworthy witness for
+this "insolence." But in the same breath he admitted that Chesterfield
+was "dignified." Now dignity is almost as doubtfully compatible with
+insolence as with impudence.
+
+[16] It is difficult to think of anyone who has combined statesmanship
+(Chesterfield's accomplishments in which are constantly forgotten),
+social gifts and literary skill in an equal degree.
+
+[17] Excluding of course purely historical and public things like the
+trials of the '45 and the riots of '80.
+
+[18] They were travelling together (always rather a test of friendship)
+in Italy, and Horace, as he confesses, no doubt gave himself airs. But
+it is pretty certain that Gray had not at this time, if he ever had,
+that fortunate combination of good (or at least well-commanded) temper
+and good breeding which enables a gentleman to meet such conduct with
+conduct on his own side as free from petulant "touchiness" as from
+ignoble parasitism.
+
+[19] Gray was not, like Walpole, a richly endowed sinecurist. But to use
+a familiar "bull" he seems never to have had anything to do, and never
+to have done it when he had. His poems are a mere handful; his excellent
+_Metrum_ is a fragment; and as Professor of History at Cambridge he
+never did anything at all.
+
+[20] They do not seem to have known each other personally. But (for
+reasons not difficult to assign but here irrelevant) Johnson was on the
+whole, though not wholly, unjust to Gray, and Gray seems to have
+disliked and spoken rudely of Johnson.
+
+[21] The varieties of what may be called literary _exercise_ which have
+been utilised for educational or recreative purposes, are almost
+innumerable. Has anyone ever tried "breaking up" a letter (such as those
+to be given hereafter) into a conversation by interlarded comment,
+questions, etc.?
+
+[22] As far as the accidents are concerned. The essentials vary not.
+Marianne is eternal, whether she faints and blushes, or jazzes and--does
+not blush.
+
+[23] One unfortunate exception, the _ex-post facto_ references to the
+split with Lady Austin, may be urged by a relentless prosecutor. But
+when William has to choose between Mary and Anna it will go hard but he
+will _have_ to be unfair to one of them.
+
+[24] This "swan's" utterances in poetry were quite unlike those of
+Tennyson's dying bird: and her taste in it was appalling. She tells
+Scott that the Border Ballads were totally destitute of any right to the
+name.
+
+[25] For a singular misjudgment on this point see Prefatory Note
+_infra_.
+
+[26] Particularly when he is able to apply the _Don Juan_ mood of
+sarcastic if rather superficial life-criticism in which he was a real
+master.
+
+[27] _I.e._ "violently and vulgarly absurd."
+
+[28] It may, however, be suggested that the extraordinary _bluntness_
+(to use no stronger word) of both is almost sufficiently evidenced in
+the fact that in his last edition of Keats Mr. Forman committed the
+additional outrage of distributing these letters according to their
+dates among the rest. The isolation of the agony gives almost the only
+possible excuse for revealing it.
+
+[29] It is of course true that Shelley himself did not at first quite
+appreciate Keats. But _Adonais_ cancels the deficit and leaves an almost
+infinite balance in favour. One can only hope that, had the
+circumstances been reversed, Keats would have set the account right as
+triumphantly.
+
+[30] This tendency makes it perhaps desirable to observe that in the
+_particular_ context of the _Belle Dame_ there is nothing whatever to
+cavil at.
+
+[31] The recent centenary saw, as usual, with much welcome appreciation
+some uncritical excesses.
+
+[32] In not a few cases they may be said to have been deliberately
+_un_prepared--intended though not labelled as "private and
+confidential."
+
+[33] In which, be it remembered, the "Life-and-Letters" system only came
+in quite late.
+
+[34] At the very moment when this is being written a considerable new
+body of them is announced for sale.
+
+[35] The word "restraint" may be misunderstood: but it is intended to
+indicate something of the general difference between "classical" ages on
+the one side and "romantic" or "realist" on the other.
+
+[36] Chesterfield's deafness might, without frivolity, be brought in. It
+is a hindrance to conversation, but none to letter-writing.
+
+[37] Or at least expression of themselves.
+
+[38] Idly: because he himself expressly and repeatedly disclaims _mere_
+"translation."
+
+[39] Dryden, in reference to Shadwell.
+
+[40] "The Great God Pan" piece ("A Musical Instrument"), one of the
+last, was perhaps her _very_ best. But he may have been thinking of
+_Poems before Congress_, which are poor enough.
+
+[41] Lucy, daughter of that curious Quaker banker's clerk Bernard
+Barton, whose poetry is negligible, but who must have had some strong
+personal attraction. For he was a favourite correspondent of two of the
+greatest of contemporary letter-writers, Lamb and FitzGerald, though he
+constantly misunderstood their letters; he received from Byron--on an
+occasion likely to provoke one of the "noble poet's" outbursts of
+pseudo-aristocratic insolence--a singularly wise and kindly answer; and
+having as a perfect stranger lectured Sir Robert Peel he was--invited to
+dinner!
+
+[42] Some have attempted to make a distinction, alleging that there are
+Franceses who can be called "Fanny" and others who can not. But it is
+doubtful whether this holds. Of two great proficients of "letter-stuff"
+in overlapping generations Fanny Burney was eminently a "Fanny." Fanny
+Kemble, though always called so, was not.
+
+[43] She was the niece of Mrs. Siddons and of John Kemble, generally
+considered the greatest tragic actor and actress we have had; the
+daughter of Charles Kemble, a player and manager of long practice and
+great ability; while she had yet another uncle and any number of more
+distant relations in the profession.
+
+[44] See Prefatory Note on her letters _infra_, for an illustration of
+what is said of her here and of Mrs. Carlyle a little further.
+
+[45] Gray may not produce this effect of slight repulsion on everyone:
+but on the other hand it is pretty generally admitted that the more you
+read Walpole the more does the prejudice, which Macaulay and others have
+helped to create against him, crumble and melt.
+
+[46] They grow more and more numerous; a fresh batch having been
+announced while this Introduction was being written.
+
+[47] I see that Mr. Paul also has made special reference to this letter
+and no wonder. From the time of its first publication I have regarded it
+as matchless. But it seems to me that while it is lawful to mention it,
+it should not have been published and that to republish it here would be
+at least questionable.
+
+[48] The present writer remembers as a boy reading (he supposes in the
+newspaper to which it was addressed but is not sure) this very
+remarkable epistle of Reade's to an editor: "Sir, you have brains of
+your own and good ones. Do not echo the bray of such a very small ass as
+the...." There was more, but this was the gist of it. Whether it has
+ever reappeared he cannot say.
+
+[49] Anthony Trollope did not choose to make his Autobiography a
+"Life-and-Letters." But he has used the inserted letter very freely and
+sometimes with great effect in his novels, for instance Mr. Slope's to
+Eleanor Harding in _Barchester Towers_.
+
+[50] In his Essay mentioned in Preface.
+
+[51] The "Answer to the Introductory Epistle" of _The Monastery_.
+
+[52] This plan was older than the "novel _by_ letters," and had, as
+noticed above, been largely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+century "heroic" romance.
+
+[53] There is of course a class exactly opposite to the
+love-letter--that of more or less modified hate or at least dislike.
+Johnson's epistle to Chesterfield is an example of the dignified form of
+this; Hazlitt's to Gifford of the undignified. But considering our
+deserved reputation for humour we are less strong than might be expected
+in letters which make the supposed writer make _himself_ ridiculous.
+Sydney Smith's "Noodle's Oration" is the sort of thing in another kind:
+and some of the letters in the _Spectator_ class of periodical are fun
+in the kind itself. Defoe's _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_ comes
+near. But we have nothing like the famous _Epistolae Obscurorum
+Virorum_, which are the very triumph of the style.
+
+[54] See the extensive classification of the Greeks, as noticed and
+reproduced before.
+
+[55] The "Letter to Sir W. Windham" of the one and the "Letter to a
+noble Lord" of the other, have ample justification. _Letters on a
+Regicide Peace_, great as they are in themselves, have less claim to
+their title. But it was a favourite with both writers.
+
+[56] The King was William and the Queen Mary, which limits considerably
+the otherwise rather illimitable "concerning the kingdom."
+
+[57] This word is of course a _vox nihili_, being neither French nor
+English. But it has usage in its favour, and I do not see that it is
+improved by writing it "_dis_habille." If anyone prefers the actual
+French form he can add the accents.
+
+[58] The account of the journey with Lintot the publisher is sometimes
+quoted in disproof of this. It is amusing, but has still to some tastes
+Pope's factitiousness without the technical charm of his verse to carry
+it off.
+
+[59] There is one small but rather famous class of letters which perhaps
+should receive separate though brief notice. It is that of laconic and
+either intentionally or unintentionally humorous utilisations of the
+letter-form. Of one sort Captain Walton's "Spanish fleet taken and
+destroyed as per margin" is probably the most noted type: of another the
+equally famous rejoinder of the Highland magnate to his rival "Dear
+Glengarry, When you have proved yourself to be my chief, I shall be
+happy to admit your claim. Meanwhile I am Yours, Macdonald." In pure
+farce of an irreverent kind, the possibly apocryphal interchange between
+a Royal Duke and a Right Reverend Bishop, "Dear Cork, Please ordain
+Stanhope, Yours, York," and "Dear York, Stanhope's ordained. Yours,
+Cork," has the palm as a recognised "chestnut." But these things are
+only the frills if not even the froth of the subject; and those who
+imitate them should exercise caution in the imitation. The
+police-courts, and even more exalted, but still more unwholesome abodes
+of Justice, have sometimes been the consequences of misguided satire in
+letters. Even in Captain Walton's case the Spaniards are said to have
+endeavoured to show that his ironical laconism (which, moreover,
+tradition has perhaps exaggerated in form) was not strictly in
+accordance with fact.
+
+[60] Wild olive, with more peaceful uses, was also the usual material
+for the _un_peaceful club, or quarter-staff, often iron-shod, of the
+ancients. It was probably like the _lathi_ which the mild Hindoo takes
+with him to political meetings. The [Greek: pelekys] of the ancients was
+generally double-bladed, hence the limitation here. This would be
+lighter and more convenient to carry in the belt.
+
+[61] Of course "the enemies'."
+
+[62] Synesius addresses his letters to Hypatia [Greek: te
+philosopho]--"To _the_ Philosophess." This contains at least two of the
+unapproachable "portmanteau" words in which Greek, and especially late
+Greek abounds--[Greek: philochoron], "loving one's country," and [Greek:
+metanasteuein], a rare and complicated compound in which I have ventured
+to see a hint of ironic intention. He feels that he will be a sort of
+shirker or deserter ([Greek: meta] often imparts this meaning) but he
+will be coming to _her_.
+
+[63] This necessity of annotating beyond suitable limits was what
+prevented me, after due re-reading for the purpose, from giving any
+letter of Cicero's.
+
+[64] _Admoneo_ in Latin not unfrequently has our commercial sense of
+"advise" = inform, or remind of a fact. It will be remembered that in
+Elizabethan English this sense was not limited to business, as in "Art
+thou avised of that."
+
+[65] The younger Pliny's full name was C. Plinius _Secundus_.
+
+[66] Among other natives of course.
+
+[67] Doubtless the game still played in Italy (_pallone_) and the South
+of France, with a wooden hand-guard strapped to the arm.
+
+[68] _Pyrgus_ is not exactly backgammon. The Romans had a sort of
+combined dice-box and board--the latter having a kind of tower fixed on
+the side with interior steps or stops, among which the dice tumbled and
+twisted before they fell out.
+
+[69] _Universitas_: but though the context seems tempting, it is too
+early for "university" as a translation.
+
+[70] _I.e._ in citizenship.
+
+[71] _I.e._ in speech.
+
+[72] Why _livescentibus_ I am not sure. "Bruised by the rough mail"? But
+Lucretius has _digiti livescunt_: and Sidonius, like other poets of
+other decadences, is apt to borrow the phrases of his great
+predecessors.
+
+[73] Sidonius has nearly as much more of this curious story: but the
+picture of the excitable Celts mobbing their heroes is vivid enough to
+make a good stopping-place. If things really went as described, one must
+suppose that a sudden panic came on the Goths, and that they took
+Ecdicius and his handful of troopers as merely _eclaireurs_ of a sally
+in force, and drew back to the higher ground to resist it.
+
+[74] His own experience of marriage cannot have made the subject wholly
+agreeable to him: for he was, it may not be quite impertinent to remind
+the reader, the first husband of Eleanor of Guienne.
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH LETTERS
+
+
+
+
+THE PASTONS. FIFTEENTH CENTURY
+
+
+     Few families in England have achieved a permanent "place i'
+     the story" after such a curious fashion as the Pastons of
+     Paston (Pastons "of that ilk") in Norfolk. They were not
+     exactly "great people" and no member of the family was of
+     very eminent distinction in any walk of life, though they
+     had judges, soldiers, and sailors etc. among them, and
+     though, some time before the house became extinct, its
+     representative attained the peerage with the title of Earl
+     of Yarmouth. But they were busy people in the troublesome
+     times of the Roses, and they obtained a good deal of
+     property, partly by the death of Sir John Fastolf, noted in
+     the French wars and muddled by posterity (there seems to
+     have been no real resemblance between them except an
+     accusation of cowardice, probably false in both cases, and
+     an imperfectly anagrammatised relation of names) with
+     Shakespeare's "Falstaff." But they produced, received, and
+     kept a great mass of letters which, despite the extinction
+     of the family in 1732 survived, were partially printed later
+     in the century by Fenn, and more fully a hundred years after
+     by the late Mr. Gairdner. Although (see Introduction) of no
+     particular literary merit they are singularly varied in
+     subject and authorship, and they give us perhaps a more
+     complete view of the domestic experiences of a single family
+     (not dissociated from public affairs) than we have from any
+     period of English history till quite modern times. Indeed,
+     it would not be easy to put the finger on an exact parallel
+     to them at _any_ time. I have selected from a great mass of
+     documents two--one of love and one of war according to the
+     good old division. John Jernyngan's letter to Margaret
+     Mauteby--wife of John Paston, and one of the most notable
+     and businesslike, though not the least affectionate of wives
+     and mothers--is interesting for its combination of the two
+     motives (were there also _two_ "Mistress Blanches"?) and for
+     the delightfully English frankness of its confession that
+     "we were well and truly beat." On the other hand, that of
+     Miss Margery Brews to John Paston the youngest (the John
+     named above had two sons of his own name) is one of the most
+     agreeable pieces of "plain and holy innocence," as Miranda
+     calls it, on record. It is immediately preceded in the
+     collection by another in which she is equally loving, and
+     quotes some of the shockingly bad fifteenth century verse.
+     One regrets to say that her "Valentine" had, apparently,
+     more than one string to his bow at the moment. However,
+     after vicissitudes in the "matter," as she delicately calls
+     it, John and Margery did marry, and from them proceeded the
+     later stages of the family. Whether things went equally well
+     with Mr. Jernyngan and his Blanche (or either of his
+     Blanches) does not seem to be recorded. (It has been thought
+     better, though the taste of the moment seems to go rather
+     the other way, not to encumber the reader with the original
+     spelling, but there is no further modernisation.)
+
+
+1. LETTER 317 (GAIRDNER)
+
+Date June 1, 1458
+
+Right worshipful and my most best beloved mistress and cousin, I
+recommend me to you as lowly as I may, ever more desiring to hear of
+your good welfare; the which I beseech almighty Jesus to preserve you
+and keep you to his pleasure and to your gracious heart's desire. And,
+if it please you to hear of my welfare, I was in good heal(th) at the
+making of this letter, blessed be God.
+
+Praying you that it please you for to send me word if my father was at
+Norwich with you at this Trinitymas or no, and how the matter doth
+between my mistress Blanche Witchingham and me and if ye suppose that it
+shall be brought about or no, and how ye feel my father, if he be well
+willing thereto or no; praying you lowly that I may be recommend(ed)
+lowly to my mistress Arblaster's wife, and to my mistress Blanche her
+daughter specially.
+
+Right worshipful cousin, if it please you for to hear of such tidings as
+we have here, the embassy of Burgundy shall come to Calais the Saturday
+after Corpus Christi day, as men say, 500 horse of them. Moreover on
+Trinity Sunday in the morning came tidings unto my Lord of Warwick that
+there were 28 sails of Spaniards on the sea, and whereof there was 16
+great ships of forecastle. And then my Lord[75] went and manned 5 ships
+of forecastle and three carvells, and four pinnaces, and on the Monday,
+in the morning after Trinity Sunday, we met together afore Calais at 4
+at the clock in the morning and fought that (_sic_) gether till 10 at
+the clock. And there we took six of their ships and they slew of our men
+about four twenties and hurt a two hundred of us right sore; and there
+were slain on their part about twelve twenties and hurt a five hundred
+of them.
+
+And (it) happened me at the first aboarding of us, we took a ship of
+three hundred ton, and I was left therein and 23 men with me; and they
+fought so sore that our men were fain to leave them, and then come they
+and aboarded[76] the ship that I was in and there I was taken, and was
+prisoner with them 6 hours, and was delivered again for their men that
+were taken before. And as men say, there was not so great a battle upon
+the sea this forty winters. And forsooth we were well and truly beat:
+and my Lord hath sent for more ships, and like to fight together again
+in haste.
+
+No more I write unto you at this time, but that it please you for to
+recommend me unto my right reverend and worshipful cousin your husband,
+and mine uncle Gurney, and to mine aunt his wife and to all good masters
+and friends where it shall please you; and after the writing I have from
+you, I shall be at you in all haste. Written on Corpus Christi day in
+great haste by your own humble servant and cousin,
+
+JOHN JERNYNGAN.
+
+
+2. LETTER 784 (GAIRDNER)
+
+Date Feb. 1477
+
+Right worshipful and well-beloved Valentine, in my most humble wise I
+recommend me unto you. And heartily I thank you for the letter which
+that ye send me by John Beckerton, whereby I am informed and know that
+ye be purposed to come to Topcroft in short time, and without any errand
+or matter but only to have a conclusion of the matter between my father
+and you. I would be most glad of any creature in life so that the
+matter might grow to effect. And there as ye say, an ye come and find
+the matter no more towards you than ye did aforetime, ye would no more
+put my father and my lady my mother to no cost nor business, for that
+cause, a good while after--which causeth mine heart to be full heavy:
+and if that ye come, and the matter take to none effect, then should I
+be much more sorry and full of heaviness.
+
+And as for myself I have done and understood in the matter that I can
+and may, as good[77] knoweth: and I let you plainly understand that my
+father will no more money part withal in that behalf but L100 and one
+mark which is right far from the accomplishment of your desire.
+
+Wherefore if that ye could be content with that good, and my poor
+person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground. And if ye think not
+yourself so satisfied, or that ye might have much more good, as I have
+understood by you afore--good, true, and loving Valentine,[78] that ye
+take no such labour upon you as to come more for that matter but let it
+pass and never more be spoken of, as I may be your true lover and
+bedeswoman[79] during my life.
+
+No more unto you at this time but Almighty Jesus preserve you both body
+and soul.
+
+By your Valentine,
+
+M. B.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[75] It is to be feared that "My Lord's" action was rather piratical.
+The "Spanish Fleet" was of merchantmen ("convoyed" perhaps) on their way
+to the North with iron etc. for fish, silk, etc., and we were not
+definitely at war with Spain. But Henry the IV. of Castile was an ally
+of France. Warwick had just been appointed "Captain of Calais," and it
+was a general English idea that anything not English in the Channel was
+fair prize. Warwick's conduct was warmly welcomed in London.
+
+[76] This use of "abord" and that just before are slightly different
+derivatives of the French _aborder_, which means to "approach,"
+"accost," "come together with" as well as to "board" in the naval sense.
+The first use here is evidently of the more general, the second of the
+particular kind.
+
+[77] This may be a mere mis-spelling of "God," or a sort of euphemism
+like the modern "thank _goodness_!" to avoid the more sacred name.
+
+[78] "I would" or "take care" or something similar to be supplied to
+make a somewhat softened imperative.
+
+[79] One who prays for you.
+
+
+
+
+ROGER ASCHAM (1515-1568)
+
+
+     Although the old phrase about "the schoolmaster being
+     abroad" has never before had anything like the amount of
+     applicableness which it now possesses, there is perhaps
+     still a certain prejudice against schoolmasters. Indeed even
+     some who have more than served time in that capacity will
+     admit that it is a dangerous employment, profession, or
+     vocation. But if all of us had been ever, or ever would try
+     to be, like Roger Ascham, our class would never have
+     deserved, or would victoriously wiped off, any obloquy. It
+     was extraordinary good quality, or more extraordinary good
+     fortune, that made the same man write _Toxophilus_ and _The
+     Schoolmaster_. And there need hardly be any admission of
+     possible good luck as causing, though some certainly helped,
+     his performance as a letter-writer. Something was said
+     before as to the importance of his "getting to English" in
+     this matter. But it may be permissible to remind, or perhaps
+     even inform, some readers of the curious combination which
+     made this importance. As a Renaissance scholar; as a College
+     tutor before the middle of the sixteenth century; as a
+     Secretary of Embassy on the Continent; and as Latin
+     Secretary at Court, he was positively _un_likely to favour
+     the vernacular. Nor could anyone be a warmer or wiser lover
+     of the classics than he was. But what he, being all these
+     things, did for English was all the more influential, while
+     the manner of his doing it could hardly be bettered.
+
+     Ascham's letters being partly in English and partly in
+     Latin, there is a certain temptation to translate one of the
+     latter and put it side by side with one of the former. But
+     the process might not be fair: and to give the fairer chance
+     of comparison between originals in the two tongues would be
+     out of the scheme of this book. I therefore choose a part of
+     one of his long letters of travel to Cambridge friends--one
+     of the earliest of the many "Up the Rhines" in English
+     literature--and another part of his letters to Cecil. He has
+     been reproached with the "begging" character of these, but
+     it was the way of the time with Renaissance scholars. In the
+     first "ioney" (Giles's text) must be wrong and towards the
+     end "vile" is an amusing blunder for "_o_ile." "Peter
+     Ailand" a Cambridge friend's child. "Brant" = "steep." In
+     the second "Denny" is Sir Anthony D., a great favourite of
+     Henry VIII. and Edward VI. who was now dead. "Cheke" the
+     still better known "Sir John" had "taught Cambridge and King
+     Edward Greek," and so raised the "goodly crop" but had taken
+     to politics, which were to bring him into trouble.[80]
+
+
+3. TO MR. EDWARD RAVEN [EXTRACT]
+
+AUGSBURG Jan. 20 1551
+
+13 Octob. We took a fair barge, with goodly glass windows, with seats of
+fir, as close as any house, we knew not whether it went or stood. Rhene
+is such a river that now I do not marvail that the poets make rivers
+gods. Rhene at Spires having a farther course to rin into the ocean sea
+than is the space betwixt Dover and Barwick is broader over a great deal
+than is Thames at Greenwich when it is calm weather. The Rhene runs fast
+and yet as smooth as the sea water stands in a vessel.
+
+From Colen this day we went to Bonna, the bishop's town, the country
+about Rhene here is plain and ioney. We were drawn up Rhene by horses.
+Little villages stand by Rhene side, and as the barge came by, six or
+seven children, some stonenaked, some in their shirts, of the bigness of
+Peter Ailand, would run by use on the sands, singing psalms, and would
+rin and sing with us half a mile, whilst they had some money.
+
+We came late to Bonna at eight of the clock: our men were come afore
+with our horse: we could not be let into the town, no more than they do
+at Calise, after an hour. We stood cold at the gate a whole hour. At
+last we were fain, lord and lady, to lie in our barge all night, where I
+sat in my lady's side-saddle, leaning my head to a malle, better lodged
+than a dozen of my fellows.
+
+14 Octob. We sailed to Brousik: 15 miles afore we come to Bonna begin
+the vines and hills keeping in Rhene on both sides for the space of five
+or six days journey as we made them almost to Mayence, like the hills
+that compass Halifax about, but far branter up, as though the rocks did
+cover you like a pentice (pent-house): on the Rhene side all this
+journey be pathways where horse and man go commonly a yard broad, so
+fair that no weather can make it foul: if you look upwards ye are afraid
+the rocks will fall on your head; if you look downwards ye are afraid to
+tumble into Rhene, and if your horse founder it is not seven to six that
+ye shall miss falling into Rhene, there be many times stairs down into
+Rhene that men may come from their boats and walk on his bank, as we did
+every day four or five miles at once, plucking grapes not with our hands
+but with our mouths if we list.
+
+The grapes grow on the brant rocks so wonderfully that ye will marvel
+how men dare climb up to them, and yet so plentifully, that it is not
+only a marvel where men be found to labour it, but also almost where men
+dwell that drink it. Seven or eight days journey ye cannot cast your
+sight over the compass of vines. And surely this wine of Rhene is so
+good, so natural, so temperate, so ever like itself, as can be wished
+for man's use. I was afraid when I came out of England to miss beer; but
+I am more afraid when I shall come into England, that I cannot lack this
+wine.
+
+It is wonder to see how many castles stand on the tops of these rocks
+unwinable. The three bishops electors, Colen, Trevers and Mayence; be
+the princes almost of whole Rhene. The lansgrave hath goodly castles
+upon Rhene which the emperor cannot get. The palatine of Rhene is also a
+great lord on this river, and hath his name of a castle standing in the
+midst of Rhene on a rock. There be also goodly isles in Rhene, so full
+of walnut trees that they cannot be spent with eating, but they make
+vile of them. In some of these isles stand fair abbeys and nunneries
+wonderfully pleasant. The stones that hang so high over Rhene be very
+much of that stone that you use to write on in tables; every poor man's
+house there is covered with them.
+
+
+4. TO CECIL [EXTRACT]
+
+BRUSSELS March 24. 1553
+
+If I should write oft, ye might think me too bold: and if I did leave
+off, ye might judge me either to forget your gentleness, or to mistrust
+your good will, who hath already so bound me unto you, as I shall rather
+forget myself, and wish God also to forget me, than not labour with all
+diligence and service to apply myself wholly to your will and purpose;
+and that ye shall well know how much I assure myself on your goodness, I
+will pass a piece of good manners, and be bold to borrow a little of
+your small leisure from your weighty affairs in the commonwealth.
+Therefore, if my letters shall find you at any leisure, they will
+trouble you a little in telling you ate length, as I promised in my last
+letters delivered unto you by Mr. Francis Yaxeley, why I am more
+desirous to have your help for my stay at Cambridge still than for any
+other kind of living elsewhere. I having now some experience of life led
+at home and abroad, and knowing what I can do most fitly, and how I
+would live most gladly, do well perceive there is no such quietness in
+England, nor pleasure in strange countries, as even in St. John's
+college, to keep company with the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,
+and Tully. Which my choice of quietness is not purposed to lie in
+idleness, nor constrained by a wilful nature, because I will not or can
+not serve elsewhere, when I trust I could apply myself to mo kinds of
+life than I hope any need shall ever drive me to seek, but only because
+in choosing aptly for myself I might bring some profit to many others.
+And in this mine opinion I stand the more gladly, because it is grounded
+upon the judgment of worthy Mr. Denny. For the summer twelvemonth before
+he departed, dinner and supper he had me commonly with him, whose
+excellent wisdom, mingled with so pleasant mirth, I can never forget:
+emonges many other talks he would say oft unto me, if two duties did not
+command him to serve, the one his prince, the other his wife, he would
+surely become a student in St. John's, saying, "The Court, Mr. Ascham,
+is a place so slippery, that duty never so well done, is not a staff
+stiff enough to stand by always very surely, where ye shall many times
+reap most unkindness where ye have sown greatest pleasures, and those
+also ready to do you most hurt to whom you never intended to think any
+harm." Which sentences I heard very gladly then, and felt them soon
+after myself to be true. Thus I, first ready by mine own nature, then
+moved by good counsel, after driven by ill fortune, lastly called by
+quietness, thought it good to couch myself in Cambridge again. And in
+very deed, too many be pluckt from thence before they be ripe, though I
+myself am withered before I be gathered, and yet not so for that I have
+stood too long, but rather because the fruit which I bear is so very
+small. Yet seeing the goodly crop of Mr. Cheke is almost clean carried
+from thence, and I in a manner alone of that time left a standing
+straggler, peradventure though my fruit be very small, yet because the
+ground from whence it sprung was so good, I may yet be thought somewhat
+fit for seed, when all you the rest are taken up for better store,
+wherewith the king and his realm is now so nobly served. And in such a
+scarcity both of those, that were worthily called away when they were
+fit, and of such as unwisely part from thence, before they be ready, I
+dare now bolden myself, when the best be gone, to do some good among the
+mean that do tarry, trusting that my diligence shall deal with my
+disability, and the rather because the desire of shooting is so well
+shot away in me, either ended by time or left off for better purpose.
+Yet I do amiss to mislike shooting too much, which hath been hitherto my
+best friend, and even now looking back to the pleasure which I found in
+it, and perceiving small repentence to follow after it, by Plato's
+judgment I may think well of it. No, it never called me to go from my
+book, but it made both wit the lustier, and will the readier, to run to
+it again, and perchance going back sometimes from learning may serve
+even as well as it doth at leaping, to pass some of those which keep
+always their standing at their book.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[80] The allusions to the writer's own _Toxophilus_ at the end require,
+it is to be hoped, no annotation.
+
+
+
+
+LADY MARY SIDNEY (?[81]-1586)
+
+
+     This "old Molly," as she so agreeably calls herself, was
+     very unfortunate in her father (that intrusive holder for a
+     short time of the title of Northumberland, who was offensive
+     in success and abject in adversity) and not too lucky in her
+     brother, Leicester. But she must have been far too good for
+     her own breed; she had an excellent husband, Sir Henry
+     Sidney, Deputy of Ireland and President of Wales, one of
+     Elizabeth's best deserving and worst treated servants, and
+     she was the mother of "Astrophel" and Astrophel's sister.
+     "One has known persons more unfortunate," as a famous phrase
+     of a French poem not very long after her own time has it.
+     And she must have thoroughly deserved good fortune: for her
+     letters show her as one of the best of wives and mothers (if
+     not of spellers): though it is quite possible that she might
+     not have made a good jurywoman or a good member of
+     parliament. As her husband was not merely governor
+     (repeatedly and with such success as was possible) of
+     Ireland, but "President of Wales," they usually, when in
+     England but not at Court or at Penshurst, lived at Ludlow
+     Castle and so enjoyed two of the most beautiful homes in the
+     country. But Sir Henry in these and other functions had seas
+     of trouble, great expenses, and according to "Gloriana's"
+     wont, very small thanks for it all. He is said, indeed, to
+     have had his life shortened by weariness and worry. But his
+     son and daughter[82] may have been a comfort to him: and his
+     wife must have been so. The letter itself, as will be seen,
+     is not to himself but to his secretary: and there was more
+     correspondence on the subject of their lodging and its
+     difficulties. Lady Mary was not well, and there must be a
+     place to see friends, and the Queen might come in! The
+     original letter[83] is better spelt than others of hers, the
+     principal curiosity being the form "hit" for "it," which,
+     however, is by no means peculiar.
+
+
+5. TO EDWARD MOLINEUX, ESQ.
+
+You have used the matter very well; but we must do more yet for the good
+dear Lord [her husband] than let him be thus dealt withal. Hampton Court
+I never yet knew so full as there were not spare rooms in it, when it
+has been thrice better filled than at the present it is. But some would
+be sorry, perhaps, my Lord should have so sure a footing in the Court.
+Well, all may be as well when the good God will. The whilst, I pray let
+us do what we may for our Lord's ease and quiet. Whereunto I think if
+you go to my Lord Howard, and in my Lord's name also move his Lordship
+to shew his brother my Lord, (as they call each other)--to show him a
+cast of his office[84] and that it should not be known allege your
+former causes, I think he will find out some place to serve that
+purpose. And also if you go to Mr Bowyer,[85] the gentleman-Usher, and
+tell him his mother requireth him (which is myself) to help my Lord
+with some one room, but only for the dispatch of the multitude of Welsh
+and Irish people that follow him; and that you will give your word in my
+Lord's behalf and mine, it shall not be accounted as a lodging[86] or
+known of, I believe he will make what shift he can: you must assure him
+it is but for the day-time for his business, as indeed it is.
+
+As for my brother's answer of[87] my stay here for five or six days, he
+knows I have ventured far already with so long absence, and am ill
+thought of for it,[88] so as that may not be. But when the worst is
+known, old Lord Harry and his old Moll will do as well as they can in
+parting[89] like good friends the small portion allotted our long
+service in Court, which as little as it is, seems something too
+much.[90] And this being all I can say to the matter, farewell, Mr. Ned.
+
+In haste this Monday 1578,
+
+your assured loving mistress and friend,
+
+M. SYDNEY.
+
+If all this will not serve, prove[91] Mr Huggins, for I know my Lord
+would not for no good be destitute in this time for some convenient
+place for his followers and friends to resort to him, which in the case
+I am in, is not possible to be in _my_ chamber till after sunset, when
+the dear good Lord shall be, as best becomes him, Lord of his own.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[81] Her birth-date does not seem to be known, but she was married in
+1551.
+
+[82] He had another, of the (for an English girl) very unusual name of
+"Ambros[z]ia" who died unmarried, at twenty.
+
+[83] Most kindly copied for me by the Rev. W. Hunt from Arthur Collins's
+_Sydney Papers_.
+
+[84] An agreeable phrase, not in the least obsolete, though I have known
+ignorant persons who thought it so. The "office" was that of Lord
+Chamberlain; the holder was Lord Howard of Effingham, afterwards famous
+in the Armada fights.
+
+[85] See _Kenilworth_ (chap. xvi.), where Scott brings him in as
+experiencing Gloriana's extreme uncertainty of temper.
+
+[86] _I.e._ a permanent one such as Hampton Court affords to some.
+
+[87] "About"?
+
+[88] Either by the Queen herself, whose touchiness is well known, or by
+jealous and mischief-making fellow courtiers.
+
+[89] "Sharing."
+
+[90] "Is grudged."
+
+[91] We should say "try."
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE CLIFFORD EARL OF CUMBERLAND
+(1558-1605)
+
+
+     This not very fortunate or wholly blameless but very
+     remarkable and representative person was the third holder of
+     the earldom and the sixteenth of the famous barony of
+     Clifford. He was great-grandson of Wordsworth's "Shepherd
+     Lord"; father of Anne Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and
+     Montgomery (pupil of Daniel the poet and a typical great
+     lady of her time); one of the foremost of Elizabeth's
+     privateering courtiers; one of the chief victims of her
+     caprice and parsimony; a magnificent noble, but a great
+     spendthrift, something of a libertine, never unkindly but
+     hardly ever wise. This remarkable deathbed letter (the
+     giving of which depended on the kindness of Dr. G. C.
+     Williamson of Hampstead, author of the _Life and Voyages of
+     G. Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland_, Cambridge University
+     Press, 1920, in which it appeared, p. 270-1), pretty well
+     explains itself. "Sweet Meg," his wife, was Lady Margaret
+     Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford. The pair were on
+     very affectionate terms for many years: but had latterly
+     been estranged by certain infidelities on the Earl's part
+     and by money disputes and difficulties, so that when his
+     last illness attacked him Lady Cumberland was not with him.
+     She was not, however, proof against this repentant appeal:
+     but returned with her daughter. Both were present at his
+     death in the Savoy soon after he wrote. He had made,
+     personally or by deputy, ten if not twelve voyages against
+     the Spaniards, and though there was a good deal of
+     mismanagement about them he took Porto Rico in one;
+     captured, but made little profit out of, an enormously
+     valuable prize, the _Madre de Dios_, in another; gave the
+     warning which enabled Lord Thomas Howard to escape, but
+     which Sir Richard Grenville refused to take "at Flores, in
+     the Azores"; and built at his own expense, the largest
+     privateer then or perhaps ever constructed, the _Malice
+     Scourge_--for the remarkable subsequent history of which,
+     see Mr. David Hannay's article, "_The Saga of a Ship_," in
+     _Blackwood_, May, 1921.
+
+
+6.
+
+Sweet and dear Meg,
+
+Bear[92] with, I pray thee, the short and unapt setting together of
+these my last lines, a token of true kindness, which I protest cometh
+out of an unfeigned heart of love to thee. For whose content, and to
+make satisfaction for the wrongs done to thee I have, since I saw thee
+more desired to return than for any other earthly cause. But being so
+low brought that, without God's miraculous favour, there is no great
+likelihood of it I, by this, if so it please God that I shall not, in
+earnestness make my last requests, which as ever thou lovest me lying
+so, I pray thee perform for me being dead. First, in greedy earnestness
+I desire thee not to offend God in grieving too much at His disposing of
+me: but let my assured hope that He hath done it for the saving of my
+soul rather comfort thee, considering that we ought most to rejoice,
+when we see a thing that it is either for the good of our souls or of
+our friends. And further I beg of thee that thou wilt take, as I have
+meant, in kindness the course I have set down for disposing of my estate
+and things left behind. Which truly, if I have not dealt most kindly
+with thee in, I am mistaken, and as ever thou lovest, (which I know thou
+hast done faithfully and truly) sweet Meg, let neither old conceit, new
+opinion, nor false lying tale, make thee fall to hard opinion nor suit
+with my brother. For this I protest now, when I tremble to speak that
+which upon any just colour may be turned to a lie, thou hast conceived
+wrong of him, for his nature is sweet, and though wrong conceit might
+well have urged him, yet he hath never to my knowledge said or done
+anything to harm thee or mine, but with tears hath often bemoaned
+himself to me that he could not devise how to make thee conceive rightly
+of him. And lastly, before the presence of God, I command thee, and in
+the nearest love of my heart I desire thee, to take great care that
+sweet Nan[93] whom God bless, may be carefully brought up in the fear of
+God, not to delight in worldly vanities, which I too well know be but
+baits to draw her out of the heavenly kingdom. And I pray thee thank thy
+kind uncle and aunt for her (?) and their many kindnesses to me. Thus,
+out of the bitter and greedy desire of a repentant heart, begging thy
+pardon for any wrong that ever in my life I did thee, I commend these my
+requests to thy wonted and undeserved kind wifely and lovely
+consideration, my body to God's disposing and my love (soul?) to His
+merciful commisseration.
+
+Thine as wholly as man was ever woman's,
+
+GEORGE CUMBERLAND.
+
+To my dear wife, the Countess of Cumberland, give this, of whom, from
+the bottom of my heart in the presence of God, I ask forgiveness for all
+the wrongs I have done her.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[92] There is, as often, little or no punctuation in the original, of
+which Dr. Williamson's beautiful book gives a facsimile. I have ventured
+to adjust that of the printed text, here and there, to bring out the
+meaning.
+
+[93] Lady Anne was at this time only 15. She seems to have been fond of
+her father and proud of him: nor is there any direct evidence that the
+fear of God was not in her. But she had no fear of man: and no excessive
+respect for her father's will. During the lives of her uncle Francis and
+her cousin Henry, 4th and 5th Earls, she fought it hard at law: and at
+last, Henry dying without issue, and the title lapsing, came into
+possession of the great Clifford estates in the North. She lived to be
+86, and was masterful all her days.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN DONNE (1573-1631)
+
+
+     "The first poet in the world for some things,"--as Ben
+     Jonson, who nevertheless did not like his metric, thought he
+     would perish for not being understood, and perhaps did not
+     understand him--called Donne with justice, might not be
+     thought likely to be among the first letter-writers. The
+     marvellous lightning-flashes of genius in a dark night of
+     context which illuminate his poetry and his sermons, can
+     hardly be expected--would indeed be almost out of place--in
+     ordinary letter-writing. Moreover, Donne is, perhaps, with
+     Browne, the most characteristic exponent of that magnificent
+     seventeenth century style which accommodates itself ill to
+     merely commonplace matters.
+
+     Browne, a younger man by an entire generation who lived far
+     into the age of Dryden, could drop this style when he chose:
+     with Donne it was rather the skin--if not even the very
+     flesh and bone and all but spirit--than the cloak of his
+     thought. Nevertheless there is no exact contemporary of
+     his--and certainly none possessing anything like his
+     literary power--who deserves selection as a representative
+     of his own school and time better than he does; and there is
+     something in him which adds distinction to any company in
+     which he appears. As mentioned in the Introduction, his
+     verse-epistles were even more noteworthy, but in prose he is
+     noteworthy enough.
+
+     The batch of letters here chosen was most fortunately
+     preserved by Izaak Walton, who published the first of them
+     _in_ the life not of Donne but of George Herbert, while the
+     rest were "added" to it in 1670.[94] The lady to whom they
+     were written, Magdalen Newport by maiden name, was mother
+     not only of the pious and poetical George, but of Edward
+     Lord Herbert of Cherbury, himself not a very bad poet but by
+     no means in the usual sense pious, a very great coxcomb, and
+     a hero chiefly by his own report. His mother, however, seems
+     to have been one of those "elect ladies" who were among the
+     chief glories of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth
+     centuries, and were fortunately numerous. After her
+     widowhood she lived at Oxford for some time, but seems to
+     have moved to London when Donne, about 1607, wrote these
+     letters. He was himself living at Mitcham (spelt "Michin" in
+     one letter), not yet famous for golf though perhaps already
+     for lavender. Later he visited her at Montgomery Castle, the
+     famous seat of the Herberts. She is said to have been very
+     beautiful, and the subtle touch of not in the least fatuous
+     or foppish "devotion" is most agreeable.
+
+
+7. TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+Madam,
+
+Your favours to me are everywhere. I use them, and have them. I enjoy
+them at London, and leave them there: and yet find them at Mitcham. Such
+riddles as these become things inexpressible: and such is your goodness.
+I was almost sorry to find your servant here this day, because I was
+loath to have any witness of my not coming home last night, and indeed
+of my coming this morning. But my not coming was excusable, because
+earnest business detained me; and my coming this day is by example of
+your St. Mary Magdalen, who rose early upon Sunday, to seek that which
+she loved most; and so did I. And, from her and myself, I return such
+thanks as are due to one, to whom we owe all the good opinion that they,
+whom we need most, have of us. By this messenger and on this good day, I
+commit the enclosed Holy Hymns and Sonnets--which for the matter not the
+workmanship have yet escaped the fire,--to your judgment and to your
+protection too, if you think them worthy of it; and I have appointed
+this enclosed Sonnet to usher them to your happy hand.
+
+      Your unworthiest servant unless your accepting
+      him to be so have mended him
+
+JO. DONNE.
+
+(MITCHAM July 11. 1607)
+
+TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT: OF ST. MARY MAGDALEN
+
+    Her of your name, whose fair inheritance
+      Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,
+    An active faith so highly did advance,
+      That she once knew, more than the church did know,
+    The Resurrection! so much good there is
+      Delivered of her, that some Fathers be
+    Loath to believe one woman could do this;
+      But think these Magdalens were two or three.
+    Increase their number, Lady, and their fame:
+      To their devotion, add your innocence;
+    Take so much of the example as the name
+      The latter half--and in some recompense
+    That they did harbour Christ Himself--a guest
+      Harbour these Hymns, to His dear Name addressed.
+
+
+8. TO THE LADY MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+Madam,
+
+Every excuse hath in it somewhat of accusation; and since I am innocent,
+and yet must excuse, how shall I do for that part of accusing. By my
+troth, as desperate and perplexed men, grow from thence bold; so must I
+take the boldness of accusing you, who would draw so dark a Curtain
+betwixt me and your purposes, as that I had no glimmering, neither of
+your goings, nor the way which my Letters might haunt. Yet, I have given
+this Licence to Travel, but I know not whither, nor it. It is therefore
+rather a Pinnace to discover; and the entire Colony of Letters, of
+Hundreds and Fifties, must follow; whose employment is more honourable,
+than that which our State meditates to _Virginia_ because you are
+worthier than all that Country, of which that is a wretched inch; for
+you have better treasure and a harmlessness. If this sound like a
+flattery, tear it out. I am to my Letters as rigid a Puritan as Caesar
+was to his Wife. I can as ill endure a suspicious and misinterpretable
+word as a fault; and of the grossest flatteries there is this good use,
+that they tell us what we should be. But, _Madam_, you are beyond
+instruction, and therefore there can belong to you only praise; of
+which, though you be no good hearer, yet allow all my Letters leave to
+have in them one part of it, which is thankfulness towards you.
+
+_Your unworthiest Servant
+Except your accepting
+have mended him_
+
+JOHN DONNE.
+
+MITCHAM, July 11, 1607.
+
+
+9. _To the worthiest Lady, Mrs._ MAGDALEN HERBER(T)
+
+_Madam_,
+
+This is my second Letter, in which though I cannot tell you what is
+good, yet this is the worst, that I must be a great part of it; yet to
+me, that is recompensed, because you must be mingled. After I knew you
+were gone (for I must, little less than accusingly tell you, I knew not
+you would go) I sent my first Letter, like a _Bevis of Hampton_, to seek
+Adventures. This day I came to Town, and to the best part of it, your
+House; for your memory is a State-cloth and Presence; which I reverence,
+though you be away; though I need not seek that there which I have about
+and within me. There, though I found my accusation, yet anything to
+which your hand is, is a pardon; yet I would not burn my first Letter,
+because as in great destiny no small passage can be omitted or
+frustrated, so in my resolution of writing almost daily to you, I would
+have no link of the Chain broke by me, both because my Letters interpret
+one another, and because only their number can give them weight. If I
+had your Commission and Instructions to do you the service of a Legier
+Ambassador here, I could say something of the Countess of _Devon_: of
+the States, and such things. But since to you, who are not only a World
+alone, but the Monarchy of the World your self, nothing can be added,
+especially by me; I will sustain myself with the honour of being
+
+_Your Servant Extraordinary
+And without place_
+
+JOHN DONNE.
+
+LONDON
+July 23, 1607
+
+
+10. _To the worthiest Lady, Mrs_. MAGDALEN HERBERT
+
+_Madam_,
+
+As we must die before we can have full glory and happiness, so before I
+can have this degree of it, as to see you by a Letter, I must almost
+die, that is, come to _London_, to plaguy _London_; a place full of
+danger, and vanity, and vice, though the Court be gone. And such it will
+be, till your return redeem it: Not that, the greatest virtue in the
+World, which is you, can be such a Marshal, as to defeat, or disperse
+all the vice of this place; but as higher bodies remove, or contract
+themselves, when better come, so at your return we shall have one door
+open to innocence. Yet, Madam, you are not such an Ireland, as produceth
+neither ill, nor good; no Spiders or Nightingales, which is a rare
+degree of perfection: But you have found and practised that experiment,
+That even nature, out of her detesting of emptiness, if we will make
+that our work to remove bad, will fill us with good things. To abstain
+from it, was therefore but the Childhood and Minority of your Soul,
+which hath been long exercised since, in your manlier active part, of
+doing good. Of which since I have been a witness and subject, not to
+tell you some times, that by your influence and example I have attained
+to such a step of goodness, as to be thankful, were both to accuse your
+power and judgment of impotency and infirmity.
+
+_Your Ladyship's in all Services_,
+
+JOHN DONNE.[95]
+
+August 2d, 1607.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[94] Mr. Gosse (who has inserted them in his _Life and Letters of
+Donne_) is perhaps right in putting letter 7 last. I give no opinion on
+this but merely keep the order in which they originally appeared in the
+text and in an appendix to the _Life of Herbert_ (1670 edit.). I am not
+certain to which "first" the "second" in letter 9 refers. "Bevis of
+Hampton" generally for "knight errant"; "Legier," a _resident_
+Ambassador; "States" in the plural--always then "the Dutch";
+_Snake_lessness is more often assigned to Ireland than spiderlessness.
+
+[95] The first of these letters, with the sonnet, appears, I think, in
+all editions of Walton, who has apparently entered the date wrongly. The
+other three were copied for me from the 1670 original by Miss Elsie
+Hitchcock, I have slightly modernised a few spellings in them.
+
+
+
+
+JAMES HOWELL (1593-1666)
+
+
+     "The Father" of something is an expression in the history of
+     literature which has become, more justly than some other
+     traditional expressions, rather odious to the modern mind.
+     For in the first place it is an irritatingly conventional
+     phrase, and in the second the paternity is usually
+     questionable. But "the priggish little clerk of the
+     Council," as Thackeray (who nevertheless loved his letters)
+     calls Howell, does really seem to deserve the fathership of
+     all such as in English write unofficial letters "for
+     publication."[96] He wrote a great deal else: and would no
+     doubt in more recent times have been a "polygraphic"
+     journalist of some distinction. And he had plenty to write
+     about. He was an Oxford man; he travelled abroad on
+     commercial errands (though by no means as what has been more
+     recently called a "commercial traveller"); he was one of Ben
+     Jonson's "sons," a Royalist sufferer from the Rebellion, and
+     finally Historiographer Royal as well as Clerk to the
+     Council. His letters, which are sometimes only titularly
+     such[97] but sometimes quite natural, deal with all sorts of
+     subjects--from the murder of Buckingham by Felton to the
+     story of the Oxenham "White Bird" which Kingsley has
+     utilised in _Westward Ho!_ And, to do him justice, there is
+     a certain character about the book which is not _merely_ the
+     expression of the character of the writer, though no doubt
+     connected with it. Now the possession of this is what makes
+     a book literature. It has been usual to select from Howell's
+     letters of travel, and from historical ones like the
+     Buckingham one above mentioned. I have preferred the "White
+     Bird"; and before it one of several documents, of the same
+     or nearly the same period, which deal with the old English
+     life of country houses--between the mediaeval time and the
+     degradation of the "servant" class, which came in with the
+     eighteenth century or a little earlier. Howell would
+     evidently have echoed Isopel Berners--that admirable girl
+     whom George Borrow slighted--in saying, "Long Melford for
+     ever!" though the house would not with him, as with her,
+     have meant a workhouse. Neither letter seems to require
+     annotation.
+
+
+11. TO DAN CALDWELL, ESQ., FROM THE LORD SAVAGE'S HOUSE IN LONG MELFORD
+
+My dear Dan,
+
+Tho' considering my former condition of life, I may now be called a
+countryman, yet you cannot call me a rustic (as you would imply in your
+letter) as long as I live in so civil and noble a family, as long as I
+lodge in so virtuous and regular a house as any, I believe, in the land,
+both for economical government and the choice company; for I never saw
+yet such a dainty race of children in all my life together. I never saw
+yet such an orderly and punctual attendance of servants, nor a great
+house so neatly kept; here one shall see no dog, nor a cat, nor cage to
+cause any nastiness within the body of the house. The kitchen and
+gutters and other offices of noise and drudgery are at the fag-end;
+there's a back-gate for the beggars and the meaner sort of swains to
+come in at; the stables butt upon the park, which, for a cheerful rising
+ground, for groves and browsings for the deer, for rivulets of water,
+may compare with any of its bigness in the whole land; it is opposite
+to the front of the great house, whence from the gallery one may see
+much of the game when they are a-hunting. Now for the gardening and
+costly choice flowers, for ponds, for stately large walks green and
+gravelly, for orchards and choice fruits of all sorts, there are few the
+like in England; here you have your Bon Chretien pear and Burgamot in
+perfection; your Muscadel grapes in such plenty that there are some
+bottles of wine sent every year to the King: and one Mr. Daniel, a
+worthy gentleman hard by who hath been long abroad, makes good store in
+his vintage. Truly this house of Long Melford tho' it be not so great,
+yet is so well compacted and contriv'd with such dainty conveniences
+every way; that if you saw the landskip of it, you would be mightily
+taken with it and it would serve for a choice pattern to build and
+contrive a house by. If you come this summer to your Manor of Sheriff in
+Essex, you will not be far off hence; if your occasions will permit, it
+will be worth your coming hither, tho' it be only to see him, who would
+think it a short journey to go from St. David's Head to Dover Cliffs to
+see and serve you, were there occasion; if you would know who the same
+is, 'tis--
+
+Yours,
+
+J. H.
+
+20. May, 1619.
+
+
+12. TO MR. E. D.
+
+Sir,
+
+I thank you a thousand times for the noble entertainment you gave me at
+Bury; and the pains you took in showing me the antiquities of that
+place. In requital, I can tell you of a strange thing I saw lately here,
+and I believe 'tis true. As I passed by St. Dunstan's in Fleet Street
+the last Saturday, I stepped into a lapidary, or stone-cutter's shop,
+to treat with the master for a stone to be put upon my father's tomb;
+and casting my eyes up and down, I might spy a huge marble with a large
+inscription upon't, which was thus to my best remembrance:
+
+     _Here lies _John Oxenham_, a goodly young man, in whose
+     chamber, as he was struggling with the pangs of death, a
+     bird with a white breast was seen fluttering about his bed,
+     and so vanished._
+
+     _Here lies also _Mary Oxenham_, the sister of the said
+     _John_, who died the next day, and the said apparition was
+     seen in the room._
+
+Then another sister is spoke of, then,
+
+     _Here lies hard by _James Oxenham_, the son of the said
+     _John_, who died a child in his cradle a little after; and
+     such a bird was seen fluttering about his head, a little
+     before he expired, which vanished afterwards._
+
+At the bottom of the stone there is:
+
+     _Here lies _Elizabeth Oxenham_ the mother of the said
+     _John_, who died sixteen years since, when such a bird with
+     a white breast was seen about her bed before her death._
+
+To all these there be divers witnesses, both squires and ladies, whose
+names are engraven upon the stone. This stone is to be sent to a town
+hard by Exeter, where this happened. Were you here, I could raise a
+choice discourse with you hereupon. So, hoping to see you the next term,
+to requite some of your favours,
+
+I rest--
+
+Your true friend to serve you,
+
+J. H.
+
+WESTMINSTER, 3 July. 1632
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[96] _Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters_ (1657).
+
+[97] Indeed his correspondents are probably sometimes, if not always,
+imaginary: and many of the letters are only what in modern periodicals
+are called "middle" articles on this and that subject, headed and tailed
+with the usual letter-formulas.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN EVELYN (1620-1706)
+
+
+     As is naturally the case with writers of "Diaries,"
+     "Memoirs," "Autobiographies," and the like, a good deal of
+     matter is deflected into Evelyn's famous _Diary_ from
+     possible letters: while his numerous and voluminous
+     published works may also to some extent abstract from or
+     duplicate his correspondence. But there is enough of
+     this[98] to make him a noteworthy epistoler. And it is
+     interesting, though not perhaps surprising, to find that
+     while his Diary is less piquant than his friend Mr. Pepys's,
+     his letters are more so. Not surprising--first, because
+     official letter-writers (Evelyn did a good deal of public
+     work but was never _exactly_ an official) often get into a
+     habit of noncommittal; and secondly, because there is, in
+     these things as in others, a principle of compensation.
+     Evelyn was almost sure to be a good letter-writer[99] for he
+     had a ready pen, a rather extraordinary range of interests
+     and capacities, plenty of time and means, extensive
+     knowledge of the world, and last but not least, a
+     tendency--not missed by the aforesaid Mr. Pepys--to bestow
+     his information and opinion freely upon less fortunately
+     endowed and equipped mortals. If he never quite reaches in
+     letters the famous passages of the Diary, describing the
+     great Fire, and Whitehall on the eve of Charles the Second's
+     mortal seizure, he sometimes comes near to this, and
+     diffuses throughout a blend of humanism, and humanity, of
+     science and art, which is very agreeable. His wife also was
+     no mean letter-writer, but only one of the minor stars of
+     that day round the moon, Dorothy Osborne, to whom we come
+     next. Of Evelyn's own letters several are specially
+     tempting. His curious plan (a particularly favourite craze
+     of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) for a small
+     "college" or lay convent of ladies and gentlemen, a sort of
+     miniature "Abbey of Thelema" is one. His magnificent eulogy
+     of the Duchess of Newcastle (Lamb's "dear Margaret"), which
+     puzzled his editor Bray (from this and other notes a rather
+     stupid man), is another: and his very interesting letter to
+     Pepys on Dreams (Oct. 4, 1689) a third. But on the whole I
+     have preferred the following, which may remind some readers
+     of Mr. Kipling's charming poem on the wonderful things our
+     fathers did and believed, with its invaluable reminder that
+     after all it would be lucky for us if we were no worse than
+     they. The date is not given: but the letter is printed
+     between one of August and one of September, 1668. [Greek:
+     kollourion] = Collyrium = "eyewash." "Stillatim" = "drop by
+     drop." "Lixivium" (Fr. "lessive") = "lye," "soapwater."
+     "Catoptrics" and "otacoustics" (though the "ot" = "ear" has
+     gone)--are fairly modern words, "phonocamptics" scarcely so.
+     In fact, I do not remember seeing it elsewhere. It does not
+     appear to be a classical Greek compound, but should mean
+     "the art of guiding and managing the voice."[100] The Tom
+     Whittal story shows that Evelyn, though given to
+     seriousness, could (God rest his soul) be a merry man
+     sometimes. The other proper names, from Mr. Oldenburg to
+     Thom. Fazzello, could be expounded without difficulty, but
+     with unnecessary expenditure of space.
+
+
+13. JOHN EVELYN TO DOCTOR BEALE
+
+Sir,
+
+I happened to be with Mr Oldenburg some time since, almost upon the
+article of his receiving the notice you sent him of your fortunate and
+useful invention; and I remember I did first of all incite him, both to
+insert it into his next transactions, and to provoke your further
+prosecution of it; which I exceedingly rejoice to find has been so
+successful, that you give us hopes of your further thoughts upon that,
+and those other subjects which you mention. You may haply call to
+remembrance a passage of the Jesuit Honorati Fabri, who speaking of
+perspectives, observes, that an object looked on through a small hole
+appears magnified; from whence he suggests, the casting of two plates
+neatly perforated, and fitted to look through, preferable to glasses,
+whose refractions injure the sight. Though I begin to advance in years
+(being now on the other side of forty), yet the continuance of the
+perfect use of my senses (for which I bless Almighty God) has rendered
+me the less solicitous about those artificial aids; which yet I foresee
+I must shortly apply myself to, and therefore you can receive but
+slender hints from me which will be worthy your acceptance upon that
+argument; only, I well remember, that besides Tiberius of old (whom you
+seem to instance in), Joseph Scaliger affirms the same happened both to
+his father Julius and himself, in their younger years. And sometimes,
+methinks, I myself have fancied to have discerned things in a very dark
+place, when the curtains about my bed have been drawn, as my hands,
+fingers, the sheet, and bedclothes; but since my too intent poring upon
+a famous eclipse of the sun, about twelve years since, at which time I
+could as familiarly have stared with open eyes upon the glorious planet
+in its full lustre, as now upon a glow-worm (comparatively speaking), I
+have not only lost the acuteness of sight, but much impaired the vigour
+of it for such purposes as it then served me. But besides that, I have
+treated mine eyes very ill near these twenty years, during all which
+time I have rarely put them together, or composed them to sleep, before
+one at night, and sometimes much later: that I may in some sort redeem
+my losses by day, in which I am continually importuned with visits from
+my neighbours and acquaintance, or taken up by other impertinencies of
+my life in this place. I am plainly ashamed to tell you this,
+considering how little I have improved myself by it; but I have rarely
+been in bed before twelve o'clock as I said, in the space of twenty
+years; and yet I read the least print, even in a jolting coach, without
+other assistance, save that I now and then used to rub my shut eye-lids
+over with a spirit of wine well rectified, in which I distil a few
+rosemary flowers much after the process of the Queen of Hungary's water,
+which does exceedingly fortify, not only my sight, but the rest of my
+senses, especially my hearing and smelling; a drop or two being
+distilled into the nose or ears, when they are never so dull; and other
+[Greek: kollourion] I never apply. Indeed, in the summer time, I have
+found wonderful benefit in bathing my head with a decoction of some hot
+and aromatical herbs, in a lixivium made of the ashes of vine branches;
+and when my head is well washed with this, I immediately cause abundance
+of cold fountain water to be poured upon me _stillatim_, for a good
+half-hour together; which for the present is not only one of the most
+voluptuous and grateful refreshments imaginable, but an incredible
+benefit to me the whole year after: for I never need other powdering to
+my hair, to preserve it bright and clean, as the gallants do; but which
+does certainly greatly prejudice transpiration by filling up, or lying
+heavy upon the pores. Those, therefore, who (since the use of perukes)
+accustom to wash their heads, instead of powdering, would doubtless find
+the benefit of it; both as to the preventing of aches in their head,
+teeth, and ears, if the vicissitude and inconstancy of the weather, and
+consequently the use of their monstrous perukes, did not expose them to
+the danger of catching colds. When I travelled in Italy, and the
+Southern parts, I did sometimes frequent the public baths (as the manner
+is), but seldom without peril of my life, till I used this frigid
+effusion, or rather profusion of cold water before I put on my garments,
+or durst expose myself to the air; and for this method I was obliged to
+the old and noble Rantzow, in whose book _De conservanda valetudine_ I
+had read a passage to this purpose; though I might have remembered how
+the Dutchmen treated their labouring horses when they are all over in a
+froth, which they wash off with several buckets of cold water, as I have
+frequently observed it in the Low Countries.
+
+Concerning other aids; besides what the masters of the catoptrics,
+phonocamptics, otacoustics, &c., have done, something has been attempted
+by the Royal Society; and you know the industrious Kircher has much
+laboured. The rest of those artificial helps are summed up by the Jesuit
+And. Schottus. I remember that Monsieur Huygens (author of the
+pendulum), who brought up the learned father of that incomparable youth
+Monsieur de Zulichem, who used to prescribe to me the benefit of his
+little wax taper (a type whereof is, with the history of it, in some of
+our Registers) for night elucubrations, preferable to all other candle
+or lamp light whatsoever. And because it explodes all glaring of the
+flame, which by no means ought to dart upon the eyes, it seems very much
+to establish your happy invention of tubes instead of spectacles, which
+have not those necessary defences.
+
+Touching the sight of cats in the night, I am not well satisfied of the
+exquisiteness of that sense in them. I believe their smelling or hearing
+does much contribute to their dexterity in catching mice, as to all
+those animals who are born with those prolix smelling hairs. Fish will
+gather themselves in shoals to any extraordinary light in the dark
+night, and many are best caught by that artifice. But whatever may be
+said of these, and other senses of fish, you know how much the sagacity
+of birds and beasts excel us; how far eagles and vultures, ravens and
+other fowls will smell the carcase; _odorumque canum vis_, as Lucretius
+expresses it, and we daily find by their drawing after the games. Gesner
+affirms that an otter will wind a fish four miles distance in the water,
+and my Lord Verulam (cent. 8) speaks of that element's being also a
+medium of sounds, as well as air. Eels do manifestly stir at the
+cracking of thunder, but that may also be attributed to some other
+tremulous motion; yet carps and other fish are known to come at the call
+and the sound of a bell, as I have been informed. Notorious is the story
+of Arion, and of Lucullus's lampreys which came _ad nomen_; and you have
+formerly minded me of Varro's Greek pipe, of which Lucian and Cicero (ad
+Atticum) take occasion to speak. Pliny's dolphin is famous, and what is
+related of the American Manati: but the most stupendous instance, that
+of the xiphia or sword-fish, which the Mamertines can take up by no
+other strategem than a song of certain barbarous words, as the thing is
+related by Thom. Fazzello. It is certain that we hear more accurately
+when we hold our mouths a little open, than when we keep them shut; and
+I have heard of a dumb gentleman in England who was taught to speak (and
+therefore certainly brought to hear in some degree) by applying the head
+of a base viol against his teeth, and striking upon the strings with the
+bow. You may remember the late effect of the drum extending the tympanum
+of a deaf person to great improvement of his hearing, so long as that
+was beaten upon; and I could at present name a friend of mine, who
+though he be exceedingly thick of hearing, by applying a straight stick
+of what length soever, provided it touch the instrument and his ear,
+does perfectly and with great pleasure hear every tune that is played:
+all which, with many more, will flow into your excellent work, whilst
+the argument puts me in mind of one Tom Whittal, a student of Christ
+Church, who would needs maintain, that if a hole could dexterously be
+bored through the skull to the brain in the midst of the forehead, a man
+might both see and hear and smell without the use of any other organs;
+but you are to know, that this learned problematist was brother to him,
+who, preaching at St. Mary's, Oxford, took his text out of the history
+of Balaam, Numb. xxii., "Am I not thine ass?" Dear Sir, pardon this
+rhapsody of,
+
+Sir, your, &c.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[98] Some 400 pages from and to him in the most compendious edition.
+
+[99] He thought, writing to Lord Spencer about 1690, that we have "few
+tolerable letters of our own country" excepting--and that only in a
+fashion--those of Bacon, Donne and Howell.
+
+[100] "_Odorumque canum vis_--as Lucretius expresses it"--perhaps
+requires a note. Evelyn ought to have known his Lucretius, the first
+book of which he translated and which he was only prevented from
+completing by some foolish scruples which Jeremy Taylor wisely but
+vainly combated. And Lucretius is fond of _vis_ as meaning "quality" or
+"faculty." But Evelyn almost certainly was thinking also, more or less,
+of Virgil's "odora canum vis," _Aen._ iv. 132.
+
+
+
+
+DOROTHY OSBORNE (1627-1695)
+
+
+     This very delightful lady--who became the wife of Sir
+     William Temple, famous in political and literary history,
+     and, by so doing or being, mistress of the household in
+     which Swift lived, suffered, but met Stella--was the
+     daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, one of the stoutest of
+     Royalists who, as Governor of Guernsey, held its Castle
+     Cornet for years against the rebels. Whether she was (in
+     1627) born there--her father had been made _Lieutenant_
+     Governor six years earlier--is not known and has been
+     thought unlikely: but the present writer (who has danced,
+     and played whist within its walls) hopes she was. When we
+     come to know her she was living at Chicksands in
+     Bedfordshire and hoping to marry Temple, though the course
+     of love ran by no means smooth. Attention was first drawn to
+     her letters, and some of them were partly printed, in
+     Courtenay's _Life_ of her husband--a book which was reviewed
+     by Macaulay in a famous essay, not overlooking Dorothy. But
+     as a body, they waited till some half century later, when
+     they were published by Judge Parry and received with joy by
+     all fit folk. They were written between 1652 and 1654. The
+     first passage is in her pleasant mood and touches on a
+     subject--aviation--which interested that day and interests
+     this. The second strikes some people as one of the most
+     charming specimens of the love-letter--written neither in
+     the violent delight that has violent end, nor in namby-pamby
+     fashion.[101]
+
+
+
+14. TO SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
+
+Sir,--
+
+You say I abuse you; and Jane says you abuse me when you say you are not
+melancholy: which is to be believed? Neither, I think; for I could not
+have said so positively (as it seems she did) that I should not be in
+town till my brother came back: he was not gone when she writ, nor is
+not yet; and if my brother Peyton had come before his going, I had
+spoiled her prediction. But now it cannot be; he goes on Monday or
+Tuesday at farthest. I hope you did truly with me, too, in saying that
+you are not melancholy (though she does not believe it). I am thought
+so, many times, when I am not at all guilty on't. How often do I sit in
+company a whole day, and when they are gone am not able to give an
+account of six words that was said, and many times could be so much
+better pleased with the entertainment my own thoughts give me, that 'tis
+all I can do to be so civil as not to let them see they trouble me. This
+may be your disease. However, remember you have promised me to be
+careful of yourself, and that if I secure what you have entrusted me
+with, you will answer for the rest. Be this our bargain then; and look
+that you give me as good an account of one as I shall give you of
+t'other. In earnest I was strangely vexed to see myself forced to
+disappoint you so, and felt your trouble and my own too. How often I
+have wished myself with you, though but for a day, for an hour: I would
+have given all the time I am to spend here for it with all my heart.
+
+You could not but have laughed if you had seen me last night. My brother
+and Mr. Gibson were talking by the fire; and I sat by, but as no part of
+the company. Amongst other things (which I did not at all mind), they
+fell into a discourse of flying; and both agreed it was very possible to
+find out a way that people might fly like birds, and despatch their
+journeys: so I, that had not said a word all night, started up at that,
+and desired they would say a little more on't, for I had not marked the
+beginning; but instead of that, they both fell into so violent a
+laughing, that I should appear so much concerned in such an art; but
+they little knew of what use it might have been to me. Yet I saw you
+last night, but 'twas in a dream; and before I could say a word to you,
+or you to me, the disorder my joy to see you had put me into awakened
+me. Just now I was interrupted, too, and called away to entertain two
+dumb gentlemen;--you may imagine whether I was pleased to leave my
+writing to you for their company;--they have made such a tedious visit,
+too; and I am so tired with making of signs and tokens for everything I
+had to say. Good God! how do those that live with them always? They are
+brothers; and the eldest is a baronet, has a good estate, a wife and
+three or four children. He was my servant heretofore, and comes to see
+me still for old love's sake; but if he could have made me mistress of
+the world I could not have had him; and yet I'll swear he has nothing to
+be disliked in him but his want of tongue, which in a woman might have
+been a virtue.
+
+I sent you a part of _Cyrus_ last week, where you will meet with one
+Doralise in the story of Abradate and Panthee. The whole story is very
+good; but the humour makes the best part of it. I am of her opinion in
+most things that she says in her character of "L'honnest homme" that she
+is in search of, and her resolution of receiving no heart that had been
+offered to anybody else. Pray, tell me how you like her, and what fault
+you find in my Lady Carlisle's letter? Methinks the hand and the style
+both show her a great person, and 'tis writ in the way that's now
+affected by all that pretend to wit and good breeding; only, I am a
+little scandalized to confess that she uses that word faithful,--she
+that never knew how to be so in her life.
+
+I have sent you my picture because you wished for it; but, pray, let it
+not presume to disturb my Lady Sunderland's. Put it in some corner where
+no eyes may find it out but yours, to whom it is only intended. 'Tis not
+a very good one, but the best I shall ever have drawn of me; for, as my
+Lady says, my time for pictures is past, and therefore I have always
+refused to part with this, because I was sure the next would be a worse.
+There is a beauty in youth that every one has once in their lives; and I
+remember my mother used to say there was never anybody (that was not
+deformed) but were handsome, to some reasonable degree, once between
+fourteen and twenty. It must hang with the light on the left hand of it;
+and you may keep it if you please till I bring you the original. But
+then I must borrow it (for 'tis no more mine, if you like it), because
+my brother is often bringing people into my closet where it hangs, to
+show them other pictures that are there; and if he miss this long
+thence, 'twould trouble his jealous head.
+
+
+15.
+
+Sir,--
+
+Who would be kind to one that reproaches one so cruelly? Do you think,
+in earnest, I could be satisfied the world should think me a dissembler,
+full of avarice or ambition? No, you are mistaken; but I'll tell you
+what I could suffer, that they should say I married where I had no
+inclination, because my friends thought it fit, rather than that I had
+run wilfully to my own ruin in pursuit of a fond passion of my own. To
+marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of the
+thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for an example
+that it may be done and not repented afterwards. Is there anything
+thought so indiscreet, or that makes one more contemptible? 'Tis true
+that I do firmly believe we should be, as you say, _toujours les
+mesmes_; but if (as you confess) 'tis that which hardly happens once in
+two ages, we are not to expect the world should discern we were not like
+the rest. I'll tell you stories another time, you return them so
+handsomely upon me. Well, the next servant I tell you of shall not be
+called a whelp, if 'twere not to give you a stick to beat myself with. I
+would confess that I looked upon the impudence of this fellow as a
+punishment upon me for my over care in avoiding the talk of the world;
+yet the case is very different, and no woman shall ever be blamed that
+an inconsolable person pretends to her when she gives no allowance to
+it, whereas none shall 'scape that owns a passion, though in return of a
+person much above her. The little tailor that loved Queen Elizabeth was
+suffered to talk out, and none of her Council thought it necessary to
+stop his mouth; but the Queen of Sweden's kind letter to the King of
+Scots was intercepted by her own ambassador, because he thought it was
+not for his mistress's honour (at least that was his pretended reason),
+and thought justifiable enough. But to come to my Beagle again. I have
+heard no more of him, though I have seen him since; we meet at Wrest
+again. I do not doubt but I shall be better able to resist his
+importunity than his tutor was; but what do you think it is that gives
+him his encouragement? He was told I had thought of marrying a gentleman
+that had not above two hundred pound a year, only out of my liking to
+his person. And upon that score his vanity allows him to think he may
+pretend as far as another. Thus you see 'tis not altogether without
+reason that I apprehend the noise of the world, since 'tis so much to my
+disadvantage.
+
+Is it in earnest that you say your being there keeps me from the town?
+If so, 'tis very unkind. No, if I had gone, it had been to have waited
+on my neighbour, who has now altered her resolution and goes not
+herself. I have no business there, and am so little taken with the place
+that I could sit here seven years without so much as thinking once of
+going to it. 'Tis not likely, as you say, that you should much persuade
+your father to what you do not desire he should do; but it is hard if
+all the testimonies of my kindness are not enough to satisfy without my
+publishing to the world that I can forget my friends and all my interest
+to follow my passion; though, perhaps, it will admit of a good sense,
+'tis that which nobody but you or I will give it, and we that are
+concerned in't can only say 'twas an act of great kindness and something
+romance, but must confess it had nothing of prudence, discretion, nor
+sober counsel in't. 'Tis not that I expect, by all your father's offers,
+to bring my friends to approve it. I don't deceive myself thus far, but
+I would not give them occasion to say that I hid myself from them in the
+doing it; nor of making my action appear more indiscreet than it is. It
+will concern me that all the world should know what fortune you have,
+and upon what terms I marry you, that both may not be made to appear ten
+times worse than they are. 'Tis the general custom of all people to make
+those that are rich to have more mines of gold than are in the Indies,
+and such as have small fortunes to be beggars. If an action take a
+little in the world, it shall be magnified and brought into comparison
+with what the heroes or senators of Rome performed; but, on the
+contrary, if it be once condemned, nothing can be found ill enough to
+compare it with; and people are in pain till they find out some
+extravagant expression to represent the folly on't. Only there is this
+difference, that as all are more forcibly inclined to ill than good,
+they are much apter to exceed in detraction than in praises. Have I not
+reason then to desire this from you; and may not my friendship have
+deserved it? I know not; 'tis as you think; but if I be denied it, you
+will teach me to consider myself. 'Tis well the side ended here. If I
+had not had occasion to stop there, I might have gone too far, and
+showed that I had more passions than one. Yet 'tis fit you should know
+all my faults, lest you should repent your bargain when 'twill not be in
+your power to release yourself; besides, I may own my ill-humour to you
+that cause it; 'tis the discontent my crosses in this business have
+given me makes me thus peevish. Though I say it myself, before I knew
+you I was thought as well an humoured young person as most in England;
+nothing displeased, nothing troubled me. When I came out of France,
+nobody knew me again. I was so altered, from a cheerful humour that was
+always alike, never over merry but always pleased, I was grown heavy and
+sullen, froward and discomposed; and that country which usually gives
+people a jolliness and gaiety that is natural to the climate, had
+wrought in me so contrary effects that I was as new a thing to them as
+my clothes. If you find all this to be sad truth hereafter, remember
+that I gave you fair warning.
+
+Here is a ring: it must not be at all wider than this, which is rather
+too big for me than otherwise; but that is a good fault, and counted
+lucky by superstitious people. I am not so, though: 'tis indifferent
+whether there be any word in't or not; only 'tis as well without, and
+will make my wearing it the less observed. You must give Nan leave to
+cut a lock of your hair for me, too. Oh, my heart! what a sigh was
+there! I will not tell you how many this journey causes; nor the fear
+and apprehensions I have for you. No, I long to be rid of you, am afraid
+you will not go soon enough: do not you believe this? No, my dearest, I
+know you do not, whatever you say, you cannot doubt that I am yours.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[101] The second passage needs little annotation except that Wrest, in
+Bedfordshire, where Dorothy met her importunate lover, was the seat of
+Anthony Grey, Earl of Kent. There is said to be a picture there of Sir
+William Temple--a copy of Lely's. Wrest Park is only a few miles from
+Chicksands. In the first "Lady Carlisle" is Lucy Percy or Hay, a "_great
+person_" in many ways--beauty, rank, wit, influence etc.--but hardly a
+good one. As for "Doralise" Dorothy is quite right. She is one of the
+brightest features of the huge _Grand Cyrus_. Perhaps it may be just
+necessary to remind readers that "servant" constantly = "lover"; that
+"side" refers to the sheet of paper she is using; and that "abuse" =
+"deceive," not "misuse" or "vituperate."
+
+
+
+
+JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)
+
+
+     The Introduction has dealt rather more fully with Swift than
+     with some others: and a further reference to a dominant
+     influence or conflict of influences on his letters will be
+     found below in the head-note on Thackeray. But a little more
+     may be said here. It is rather unfortunate that we have not
+     more _early_ letters from him (we have some, if only
+     fragments, from Thackeray, and they are no small "light").
+     We should like some concerning that curious career at
+     Trinity College, Dublin, which was ended _speciali gratia_,
+     leaving the usual wranglers to their usual wrangle whether
+     the last word meant "grace" or "_dis_grace." Others, written
+     in various moods from the time when Sir William Temple
+     "spoiled a fine gentleman," and Esther Johnson set running a
+     life-long course of _un_-smooth love, would be more welcome
+     still. They would no doubt be stumbling-blocks to those apt
+     to stumble, just as the existing epistles are: but they
+     would be stepping-stones for the wise. As it is, we have to
+     do without them and perhaps, like most things that are, it
+     is better. For the stumblers are saved the sin of stumbling,
+     and the wise men the nuisance of seeing them do it, and
+     trying to set them right. And there might have been only
+     more painful revelations of the time when, to adjust the
+     words of the famous epitaph "fierce indignation still
+     _could_ lacerate the heart," that had felt so fondly and so
+     bitterly what it had to feel.
+
+     What follows is characteristic enough[102] and intelligible
+     enough to those who will give their intelligence fair play,
+     asking only for information of _facts_. These latter can be
+     supplied at no great length even to those who are
+     unacquainted with Swift's biography. "M. D." is the pet name
+     for Stella, and her rather mysterious companion Mrs. Dingley
+     who lived with her in Dublin and played something like the
+     part of the alloys which are used in experimenting with some
+     metals.[103] "Presto" is Swift himself. "Prior" is the poet.
+     "Sir A. Fountaine" was a Norfolk squire and a great
+     collector of artistic things, most of which were sold not
+     very long ago. "Sterne" (John) was an Irish clergyman and
+     afterwards a bishop, but not of the same family as the
+     novelist. "Cousin _Dryden_ Leach" reminds us that Swift was
+     also a cousin of Dryden the poet. "Oroonoko" refers to Afra
+     Behn's introduction of the "noble savage" to English
+     interest. "Patrick" was Swift's very unsatisfactory
+     man-servant. "Bernage" a French Huguenot refugee. "George
+     Granville," of the family of the hero of the _Revenge_, was
+     a great Tory, a peer a little later with the title of
+     Lansdowne, and a rather better poet than Johnson thought
+     him. "St. John" and "Harley," if not also "Masham," should
+     not need annotation. Notice the seven, (literally seven!)
+     leagued word at the end. Swift calls their attention to it
+     when beginning his next instalment.
+
+
+16. TO STELLA
+
+LONDON, January 16, 1710-11.
+
+O faith, young women, I have sent my letter N. 13, without one crumb of
+an answer to any of MD's; there's for you now; and yet Presto ben't
+angry faith, not a bit, only he will begin to be in pain next Irish
+post, except he sees MD's little hand-writing in the glass frame at the
+bar of St James's Coffeehouse, where Presto would never go but for that
+purpose. Presto's at home, God help him, every night from six till bed
+time, and has as little enjoyment or pleasure in life at present as any
+body in the world, although in full favour with all the ministry. As
+hope saved, nothing gives Presto any sort of dream of happiness, but a
+letter now and then from his own dearest MD. I love the expectation of
+it, and when it does not come, I comfort myself, that I have it yet to
+be happy with. Yes, faith, and when I write to MD, I am happy too; it is
+just as if methinks you were here, and I prating to you, and telling you
+where I have been: Well, says you, Presto, come, where have you been
+to-day? come, let 's hear now. And so then I answer; Ford and I were
+visiting Mr Lewis, and Mr Prior, and Prior has given me a fine Plautus,
+and then Ford would have had me dine at his lodgings, and so I would
+not; and so I dined with him at an eating-house; which I have not done
+five times since I came here; and so I came home, after visiting Sir
+Andrew Fountaine's mother and sister, and Sir Andrew Fountaine is
+mending, though slowly.
+
+17. I was making, this morning, some general visits, and at twelve I
+called at the coffeehouse for a letter from MD; so the man said he had
+given it to Patrick; then I went to the Court of Requests and Treasury
+to find Mr Harley, and after some time spent in mutual reproaches, I
+promised to dine with him; I staid there till seven, then called at
+Sterne's and Leigh's to talk about your box, and to have it sent by
+Smyth. Sterne says he has been making inquiries, and will set things
+right as soon as possible. I suppose it lies at Chester, at least I hope
+so, and only wants a lift over to you. Here has little Harrison been to
+complain, that the printer I recommended to him for his Tatler is a
+coxcomb; and yet to see how things will happen; for this very printer is
+my cousin, his name is Dryden Leach; did you never hear of Dryden Leach,
+he that prints the Postman? He acted Oroonoko, he's in love with Miss
+Cross.--Well, so I came home to read my letter from Stella, but the dog
+Patrick was abroad; at last he came, and I got my letter; I found
+another hand had superscribed it; when I opened it, I found it written
+all in French, and subscribed Bernage: faith, I was ready to fling it at
+Patrick's head. Bernage tells me, had been to desire your recommendation
+to me to make him a captain; and your cautious answer, "That he had as
+much power with me as you," was a notable one; if you were here, I would
+present you to the ministry as a person of ability. Bernage should let
+me know where to write to him; this is the second letter I have had
+without any direction; however, I beg I may not have a third, but that
+you will ask him, and send me how I shall direct to him. In the mean
+time, tell him, that if regiments are to be raised here, as he says, I
+will speak to George Granville, Secretary at War, to make him a captain;
+and use what other interest I conveniently can. I think that is enough,
+and so tell him, and don't trouble me with his letters when I expect
+them from MD; do you hear, young women, write to Presto.
+
+18. I was this morning with Mr Secretary St John, and we were to dine
+at Mr Harley's alone, about some business of importance, but there
+were two or three gentlemen there. Mr Secretary and I went together
+from his office to Mr Harley's, and thought to have been very wise;
+but the deuce a bit: the company staid, and more came, and Harley went
+away at seven, and the Secretary and I staid with the rest of the
+company till eleven; I would then have had him come away, but he was
+in for't; and though he swore he would come away at that flask, there
+I left him. I wonder at the civility of these people; when he saw I
+would drink no more, he would always pass the bottle by me, and yet I
+could not keep the toad from drinking himself, nor he would not let me
+go neither, nor Masham, who was with us. When I got home I found a
+parcel directed to me, and opening it, I found a pamphlet written
+entirely against myself, not by name, but against something I writ: it
+is pretty civil, and affects to be so, and I think I will take no
+notice of it; 'tis against something written very lately; and indeed I
+know not what to say, nor do I care; and so you are a saucy rogue for
+losing your money to-day at Stoyte's; to let that bungler beat you, fy
+Stella, an't you ashamed? well, I forgive you this once, never do so
+again; no, noooo. Kiss and be friends, sirrah.--Come, let me go sleep;
+I go earlier to bed than formerly; and have not been out so late these
+two months; but the secretary was in a drinking humour. So good night,
+myownlittledearsaucyinsolentrogues.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[102] As such, it has commended itself to other selectors. But
+duplication, though it has been sedulously avoided here, is sometimes
+almost inevitable.
+
+[103] _I.e._ the part of facilitating the operation, and disappearing in
+the results aimed at.
+
+
+
+
+LADY MARY WORTLEY-MONTAGU (1689-1762)
+
+
+     The ratio of importance between life and letters varies a
+     good deal with different writers: and the circumstances of
+     the life have seldom been of more importance to the letter
+     than in the case of "Lady Mary"--Pierrepont as she was born.
+     When she was a girl she held an unusual place in the house
+     of her widowed father the Duke of Kingston. Her courtship
+     by, or with, or of (one doubts as to the preposition) Edward
+     Wortley-Montagu, a descendant of Pepys's Lord Sandwich, had
+     peculiarities, and her marriage with him more. She was a
+     sort of pet at George the First's court; she went with her
+     husband to Constantinople as Ambassadress; she introduced
+     inoculation into England; she was, under imperfectly known
+     circumstances, first the idol and then the abomination of
+     Pope; she lived for more than twenty years in France and
+     Italy, having left her husband without, apparently, any
+     quarrel between them; and she only came home in 1761 to die
+     next year. Like her predecessor as Queen of letter-writers,
+     Madame de Sevigne (to whom she was amusingly and rather
+     femininely unjust), she had a favourite daughter (who became
+     Lady Bute[104]); but, unlike her, she had a most
+     objectionable son who was apparently half mad. There was,
+     however, not the slightest madness about Lady Mary--in fact,
+     most of the objectors (perhaps unjust ones) to her have
+     held that her head was very much better than her heart. Her
+     most popular letters have usually been the Turkish ones,
+     and, at the other end of her life, her Italian descriptions:
+     but selections almost invariably pitch on the curious early
+     one in which she, so to speak, "proposes" to her future
+     husband rather more than, or at least as much as, she
+     accepts his proposal. I prefer, both as less popularised and
+     as more unique still, the following most business-like[105]
+     plan and programme of an elopement. Like Mr. Foker's fight
+     with the post-boy it "didn't come off" as first planned; but
+     Fortune favoured it later.
+
+
+17. TO MR. WORTLEY-MONTAGU
+
+Saturday morning (August, 1712)
+
+I writ you a letter last night in some passion. I begin to fear again; I
+own myself a coward.--You made no reply to one part of my letter
+concerning my fortune. I am afraid you flatter yourself that my F.
+[father] may be at length reconciled and brought to reasonable terms. I
+am convinced, by what I have often heard him say, speaking of other
+cases like this, he never will. The fortune he has engaged to give with
+me, was settled on my B. [brother's] marriage, on my sister and on
+myself; but in such a manner, that it was left in his power to give it
+all to either of us, or divide it as he thought fit. He has given it
+all to me. Nothing remains for my sister, but the free bounty of my F.
+[father] from what he can save; which, notwithstanding the greatness of
+his estate, may be very little. Possibly after I have disobliged him so
+much, he may be glad to have her so easily provided for, with money
+already raised; especially if he has a design to marry himself, as I
+hear. I do not speak this that you should not endeavour to come to terms
+with him, if you please; but I am fully persuaded it will be to no
+purpose. He will have a very good answer to make:--that I suffered this
+match to proceed; that I made him make a very silly figure in it; that I
+have let him spend L400 in wedding-cloaths; all which I saw without
+saying any thing. When I first pretended to oppose this match, he told
+me he was sure I had some other design in my head; I denied it with
+truth. But you see how little appearance there is of that truth. He
+proceeded with telling me that he never would enter into treaty with
+another man, &c., and that I should be sent immediately into the North
+to stay there; and, when he died, he would only leave me an annuity of
+L400. I had not courage to stand this view, and I submitted to what he
+pleased. He will now object against me,--why, since I intended to marry
+in this manner, I did not persist in my first resolution; that it would
+have been as easy for me to run away from T. [Thoresby] as from hence;
+and to what purpose did I put him, and the gentleman I was to marry, to
+expences, &c.? He will have a thousand plausible reasons for being
+irreconcileable, and 'tis very probable the world will be of his side.
+Reflect now for the last time in what manner you must take me. I shall
+come to you with only a night-gown and petticoat, and that is all you
+will get with me. I told a lady of my friends what I intend to do. You
+will think her a very good friend when I tell you she has proffered to
+lend us her house if we would come there the first night. I did not
+accept of this till I had let you know it. If you think it more
+convenient to carry me to your lodgings, make no scruple of it. Let it
+be where it will: if I am your wife I shall think no place unfit for me
+where you are. I beg we may leave London next morning, wherever you
+intend to go. I should wish to go out of England if it suits with your
+affairs. You are the best judge of your father's temper. If you think it
+would be obliging to him, or necessary for you, I will go with you
+immediately to ask his pardon and his blessing. If that is not proper at
+first, I think the best scheme is going to the Spa. When you come back,
+you may endeavour to make your father admit of seeing me, and treat with
+mine (though I persist in thinking it will be to no purpose). But I
+cannot think of living in the midst of my relations and acquaintance
+after so unjustifiable a step:--unjustifiable to the world,--but I think
+I can justify myself to myself. I again beg you to hire a coach to be at
+the door early Monday morning, to carry us some part of our way,
+wherever you resolve our journey shall be. If you determine to go to
+that lady's house, you had better come with a coach and six at seven
+o'clock tomorrow. She and I will be in the balcony that looks on the
+road: you have nothing to do but to stop under it, and we will come down
+to you. Do in this what you like best. After all, think very seriously.
+Your letter, which will be waited for, is to determine everything. I
+forgive you a coarse expression in your last, which, however, I wish had
+not been there. You might have said something like it without expressing
+it in that manner; but there was so much complaisance in the rest of it
+I ought to be satisfied. You can shew me no goodness I shall not be
+sensible of. However, think again, and resolve never to think of me if
+you have the least doubt, or that it is likely to make you uneasy in
+your fortune. I believe to travel is the most likely way to make a
+solitude agreeable, and not tiresome: remember you have promised it.
+
+'Tis something odd for a woman that brings nothing to expect anything;
+but after the way of education, I dare not pretend to live but in some
+degree suitable to it. I had rather die than return to a dependancy upon
+relations I have disobliged. Save me from that fear if you love me. If
+you cannot, or think I ought not to expect it, be sincere and tell me
+so. 'Tis better I should not be yours at all, than, for a short
+happiness, involve myself in ages of misery. I hope there will never be
+occasion for this precaution; but, however, 'tis necessary to make it. I
+depend entirely on your honour, and I cannot suspect you of any way
+doing wrong. Do not imagine I shall be angry at any thing you can tell
+me. Let it be sincere; do not impose on a woman that leaves all things
+for you.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[104] The likeness, however, ended with the favouritism: for Madame de
+Grignan, in spite of good looks and good wits, was apparently detested
+by everybody, except her mother, and deserved it: while nobody has
+anything to say against Lady Bute.
+
+[105] It is, of course, not _merely_ business-like--the mixture of
+something else makes it rather fascinating. They were curiously fond of
+elopements in the eighteenth century, Sheridan's satire in _The Rivals_
+having ample justification. Nor was this merely due to the more severe
+exercise of paternal authority. For they often preferred (as the
+philosophical parent of the celebrated Mrs. Greville remarked when his
+daughter ran away with Mr. G.) to "get out of the window when there was
+not the slightest objection to their passing through the door."
+
+
+
+
+PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF
+CHESTERFIELD (1694-1773)
+
+
+     As was suggested in the Introduction, where perhaps enough
+     has been said of his actual letters, the fourth Earl of
+     Chesterfield is too commonly known, or rather _mis_known,
+     only by Johnson's refusal of his patronage and condemnation
+     of his manners and morals, by Dickens's caricature, and by
+     Thackeray's not untrue but merely fragmentary sketch of him
+     as a gambler. Therefore, though these preliminary notes are
+     not as a rule biographical, this may be one of the
+     exceptions; for his life was anything but that of a mere
+     idler and _grand Seigneur_. He entered the House of Commons
+     before he was of age, and had much to do with political and
+     literary as well as Court society before, in 1725, he
+     succeeded to the peerage. A year or two afterwards he went
+     as ambassador to the Hague, a post which he held, doing some
+     important business, for four years. On coming home he became
+     a formidable opponent of Walpole, and at one time led the
+     opposition in the Upper House. He was a most successful
+     Viceroy in Ireland at the difficult period of the "'45," and
+     a judicious "Secretary for the North" after it. He conducted
+     the reform of the Calendar through Parliament, and only gave
+     up active participation in home politics because of his
+     increasing deafness. In foreign affairs he was an adroit and
+     successful diplomatist, and made an early and remarkably
+     clear-sighted anticipation of the French Revolution. It is
+     not extravagant to say that, if he had had his fortune and
+     position to make, he might have been one of the foremost
+     men of his time in politics or letters or both; and that he
+     was not far below such rank in either. The following letter
+     is one of the most characteristic of those at which it has
+     been the fashion to sneer. All one can say of it is, "What a
+     blessing it would be if a good many people in the twentieth
+     century, and in places varying from the streets to the House
+     of Commons, would obey at least some of its precepts!"
+
+
+18. LORD CHESTERFIELD TO HIS SON
+
+LONDON. Sept. 22, O.S., 1749
+
+Dear Boy,
+
+If I had faith in philters and love potions, I should suspect that you
+had given Sir Charles Williams some, by the manner in which he speaks of
+you, not only to me, but to everybody else. I will not repeat to you
+what he says of the extent and correctness of your knowledge, as it
+might either make you vain, or persuade you that you had already enough
+of what nobody can have too much. You will easily imagine how many
+questions I asked and how narrowly I sifted him upon your subject: he
+answered me, and I daresay with truth, just as I could have wished;
+till, satisfied entirely with his accounts of your character and
+learning, I inquired into other matters, intrinsically indeed of less
+consequence, but still of great consequence to every man, and of more to
+you than to almost any man; I mean, your address, manners and air. To
+these questions, the same truth which he had observed before, obliged
+him to give me much less satisfactory answers. And, as he thought
+himself in friendship both to you and me, obliged to tell me the
+disagreeable as well as the agreeable truths, upon the same principle I
+think myself obliged to repeat them to you.
+
+He told me, then, that in company you were frequently most _provokingly_
+inattentive, absent, and _distrait_. That you came into a room, and
+presented yourself very awkwardly; that at table you constantly threw
+down knives, forks, napkins, bread, etc., and that you neglected your
+person and dress, to a degree unpardonable at any age, and much more so
+at yours.
+
+These things, however immaterial soever they may seem to people who do
+not know the world and the nature of mankind, give me, who know them to
+be exceedingly material, very great concern. I have long distrusted you,
+and therefore frequently admonished you upon these articles; and I tell
+you plainly, that I shall not be easy till I hear a very different
+account of them. I know of no one thing more offensive to a company,
+than that inattention and _distraction_. It is showing them the utmost
+contempt; and people never forgive contempt. No man is _distrait_ with
+the man he fears, or the woman he loves; which is a proof that every man
+can get the better of that _distraction_ when he thinks it worth his
+while to do so; and, take my word for it, it is always worth his while.
+For my own part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than with
+an absent one; for if the dead man gives me no pleasure, at least he
+shows me no contempt; whereas the absent man, silently indeed, but very
+plainly, tells me that he does not think me worth his attention.
+Besides, can an absent man make any observations upon the characters,
+customs, and manners of the company? No. He may be in the best companies
+of his lifetime (if they will admit him, which, if I were they, I would
+not), and never be one jot the wiser. I never will converse with an
+absent man; one may as well talk with a deaf one. It is, in truth, a
+practical blunder, to address ourselves to a man, who we see plainly
+neither hears, minds, nor understands us. Moreover, I aver that no man
+is, in any degree, fit for either business or conversation, who cannot,
+and does not, direct and command his attention to the present object, be
+that what it will.
+
+You know, by experience, that I grudge no expense in your education, but
+I will positively not keep you a flapper. You may read, in Dr. Swift,
+the description of these flappers, and the use they were of to your
+friends the Laputans; whose minds (Gulliver says) are so taken up with
+intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the
+discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon
+the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those people who are
+able to afford it, always keep a flapper in their family, as one of
+their domestics, nor ever walk about, or make visits, without him. This
+flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his
+walks, and, upon occasion, to give a soft flap upon his eyes; because he
+is always so wrapt up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of
+falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post,
+and, in the streets, of jostling others, or being jostled into the
+kennel himself. If _Christian_ will undertake this province into the
+bargain, with all my heart; but I will not allow him any increase of
+wages upon that score.
+
+In short, I give you fair warning, that when we meet, if you are absent
+in mind, I will soon be absent in body; for it will be impossible for me
+to stay in the room; and if at table you throw down your knife, plate,
+bread, etc., and hack the wing of a chicken for half an hour, without
+being able to cut it off, and your sleeve all the time in another dish,
+I must rise from table to escape the fever you would certainly give me.
+Good God! How I should be shocked if you came into my room, for the
+first time, with two left legs, presenting yourself with all the graces
+and dignity of a tailor, and your clothes hanging upon you like those in
+Monmouth Street, upon tenter-hooks! Whereas I expect, nay require, to
+see you present yourself with the easy and gentle air of a man of
+fashion who has kept good company. I expect you not only well dressed,
+but very well dressed; I expect a gracefulness in all your motions, and
+something particularly engaging in your address. All this I expect, and
+all these it is in your power, by care and attention, to make me find;
+but, to tell you the plain truth, if I do not find it, we shall not
+converse very much together; for I cannot stand inattention and
+awkwardness; it would endanger my health.
+
+You have often seen, and I have as often made you observe, L[yttelton]'s
+distinguished inattention and awkwardness. Wrapped up like a Laputan in
+intense thought, and possibly sometimes in no thought at all--which, I
+believe, is very often the case with absent people--he does not know his
+most intimate acquaintance at sight, or answers them as if they were at
+cross purposes. He leaves his hat in one room, his sword in another, and
+would leave his shoes in a third, if his buckles, although awry, did not
+save them; his legs and arms, by his awkward management of them, seem to
+have undergone the _question extraordinaire_; and his head, always
+hanging upon one or other of his shoulders, seems to have received the
+first stroke upon a block. I sincerely value and esteem him for his
+parts, learning, and virtue; but, for the soul of me, I cannot love him
+in company. This will be universally the case, in common life, of every
+inattentive awkward man, let his real merit and knowledge be ever so
+great.
+
+When I was of your age, I desired to shine, as far as I was able, in
+every part of life; and was as attentive, to my manners, my dress, and
+my air, in company on evenings, as to my books, and my tutor in the
+mornings. A young fellow should be ambitious to shine in everything;
+and, of the two, rather overdo than underdo. These things are by no
+means trifles; they are of infinite consequence to those who are to be
+thrown into the great world, and who would make a figure or a fortune in
+it. It is not sufficient to deserve well, one must please well too.
+Awkward, disagreeable merit, will never carry anybody far. Wherever you
+find a good dancing master, pray let him put you upon your haunches; not
+so much for the sake of dancing, as for coming into a room and
+presenting yourself genteelly and gracefully. Women, whom you ought to
+endeavour to please, cannot forgive a vulgar and awkward air and
+gestures; _il leur faut du brillant_. The generality of men are pretty
+like them, and are equally taken by the same exterior graces.
+
+I am very glad that you have received the diamond buckles safe: All I
+desire in return for them, is, that they may be buckled even upon your
+feet, and that your stockings may not hide them. I should be sorry you
+were an egregious fop; but I protest that, of the two, I would rather
+have you a fop than a sloven. I think negligence in my own dress, even
+at my age, when certainly I expect no advantages from my dress, would be
+indecent with regard to others. I have done with fine clothes; but I
+will have my plain clothes fit me, and made like other people's. In the
+evenings I recommend to you the company of women of fashion, who have a
+right to attention, and will be paid it. Their company will smooth your
+manners, and give you a habit of attention and respect; of which you
+will find the advantage among men.
+
+My plan for you, from the beginning, has been to make you shine, equally
+in the learned and in the polite world; The former part is almost
+completed to my wishes, and will, I am persuaded, in a little time more,
+be quite so. The latter part is still in your power to complete; and I
+flatter myself that you will do it, or else the former part will avail
+you very little; especially in your deportment, where the exterior
+address and graces do half the business; they must be harbingers of your
+merit, or your merit will be very coldly received: all can, and do judge
+of the former, few of the latter.
+
+Mr. Harte tells me that you have grown very much since your illness: if
+you get up to five feet ten, or even nine inches, your figure will,
+probably, be a good one; and if well dressed and genteel, will probably
+please; which is a much greater advantage to a man than people commonly
+think. Lord Bacon calls it a letter of recommendation.
+
+I would wish you to be an _omnis homo_, _l'homme universel_. You are
+nearer it, if you please, than ever anybody was at your age; and if you
+will but, for the course of this next year only, exert your whole
+attention to your studies in the morning, and to your address, manners,
+air, and _tournure_ in the evenings, you will be the man I wish you, and
+the man that is rarely seen.
+
+Our letters go, at best, so irregularly and so often miscarry totally,
+that, for greater security, I repeat the same things. So, though, I
+acknowledged by last post Mr Harte's letter of the 8th September, N.S.,
+I acknowledge it again by this to you. If this should find you still at
+Verona, let it inform you, that I wish you to set out soon for Naples;
+unless Mr. Harte should think it better for you to stay at Verona, or
+any other place on this side Rome, till you go there for the Jubilee.
+Nay, if he likes it better, I am very willing that you should go
+directly from Verona to Rome; for you cannot have too much of Rome,
+whether upon account of the language, the curiosities, or the company.
+My only reason for mentioning Naples, is for the sake of the climate,
+upon account of your health; but, if Mr. Harte thinks your health is now
+so well restored as to be above climate, he may steer your course
+wherever he thinks proper; and, for aught I know, your going directly to
+Rome, and consequently staying there so much the longer, may be as well
+as anything else. I think you and I cannot put our affairs into better
+hands than in Mr. Harte's; and I will take his infallibility against the
+Pope's, with some odds on his side. _A propos_ of the Pope; remember to
+be presented to him before you leave Rome, and go through the necessary
+ceremonies for it, whether of kissing his slipper or...; for I would
+never deprive myself of anything I wanted to do or see, by refusing to
+comply with an established custom. When I was in Catholic countries, I
+never declined kneeling in their churches at the elevation, nor
+elsewhere, when the Host went by. It is a complaisance due to the custom
+of the place, and by no means, as some silly people have imagined, an
+implied approbation of their doctrine. Bodily attitudes and situations
+are things so very indifferent in themselves, that I would quarrel with
+nobody about them. It may indeed be improper for Mr. Harte to pay that
+tribute of complaisance, upon account of his character.
+
+This letter is a very long, and possibly a very tedious one; but my
+interest for your perfection is so great, and particularly at this
+critical and decisive period of your life, that I am only afraid of
+omitting, but never of repeating, or dwelling too long upon anything
+that I think may be of the least use to you. Have the same anxiety for
+yourself that I have for you, and all will do well. Adieu, my dear
+child!
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE BALLARD (1706-1755)
+
+
+     The extreme wickedness of reviewers has been a conviction
+     with many authors--who have sometimes, it would seem,
+     succumbed to it themselves and retaliated in reviewing
+     others. The following letter to Dr. Lyttelton, Dean of
+     Exeter, is a very early (1753) and not unamusing example of
+     this conviction: and is given as such, though the writer has
+     no wide fame. His history is, however, interesting and
+     shows, among other things, how entirely erroneous is the
+     idea that till recently (and even now to some extent)
+     opportunities of showing themselves able to profit by
+     education were and are denied to the "lower classes" in
+     England. Ballard was apprenticed to a staymaker
+     ("habit-maker" as others say) at Chipping-Campden, but
+     betook himself in his leisure hours to the study of
+     Anglo-Saxon. Hearing of which fact the gentlemen of the
+     local hunt (the boozy squire-tyrants of popular tradition)
+     subscribed for an annuity of L100 a year to him, but he
+     would only accept L60. With this he went up to Oxford to
+     enjoy the Bodleian, was made a "clerk" at Magdalen and later
+     an esquire-bedell to the University. He did much good work
+     of the antiquarian kind, and died a year or two after
+     writing this letter, having (one hopes) relieved himself by
+     his protest and been consoled by a kind answer from
+     Lyttelton.[106]
+
+
+
+19. TO DR. LYTTELTON, DEAN OF EXETER
+
+A DEFENCE OF THE HISTORY OF LEARNED LADIES
+
+Revd. and Hond. Sir,
+
+My best acknowledgments are due for the favour of two epistles; the
+first of which I received a few minutes after my last set forward for
+Exeter. I would have answered it immediately, but that I thought a
+little respite might be agreeable, before I gave you the trouble of
+another long letter.
+
+The day before I received your first epistle, a Gent. of my acquaintance
+brought me the _Monthly Review_ for February, that I might see what the
+candid and genteel authors of that work had said of mine. They observe
+to the publick, that _I have said_ C. Tishem was so skilled in the Greek
+Tongue, that she could read Galen in its original, which very few
+Physicians are able to do. Whether this was done maliciously, in order
+to bring the wrath of the AEsculapians upon me, or inadvertently, I
+cannot say: but I may justly affirm, that they have used me very ill in
+that affair; since if they had read with attention, which they ought to
+have done before they attempted to give a character of the Book, they
+must have known that the whole account of that lady (which is but one
+page) is not mine, but borrowed with due acknowledgment from the
+_General Dictionary_. They are likewise pleased to inform the world
+that I have been rather too industrious in the undertaking, having
+introduced several women who hardly deserved a place in the work. I did
+not do this for want of materials; neither did I do it rashly, without
+advising with others of superior judgment in those affairs, of which
+number Mr. Professor Ward was one. But those pragmatical Censors seem to
+have but little acquaintance with those studies, or otherwise they might
+have observed that all our general Biographers, as Leland, Bale, Pits,
+Wood, and Tanner, have trod the very same steps; and have given an
+account of all the authors they could meet with, good and bad, just as
+they found them: and yet, I have never heard of anyone that had courage
+or ill-nature enough, to endeavour to expose them for it. While I was
+ruminating on these affairs, three or four letters came to my hands, and
+perceiving one of them come from my worthy friend the Dean of Exeter, I
+eagerly broke it open, and was perfectly astonished to find myself
+charged with _party zeal_ in my book; and that from thence the most
+candid reader might conclude the author to be both a Church and State
+Tory. But after having thoroughly considered all the passages objected
+to, and not finding the least tincture of either Whig or Tory principles
+contained in them, I began to cheer up my drooping spirits, in hopes
+that I might possibly out-live my supposed crime; but, alas! to my still
+greater confusion! when I opened my next letter from a Tory
+acquaintance, I was like one thunderstruck at the contents of it. He
+discharges his passionate but ill-grounded resentment upon me most
+furiously. He tells me, he did not imagine Magdalen College could have
+produced such a rank Whig. He reproaches me with want of due esteem for
+the Stuart Family, to whom he says I have shewn a deadly hatred, and he
+gives me, as he imagines, three flagrant instances of it. 1. That I have
+unseasonably and maliciously printed a letter of Queen Elizabeth's, in
+order to blacken the memory of Mary Queen of Scots, and that too, at a
+time when her character began to shine as bright as the Sun. 2dly. That
+I have endeavoured to make her memory odious, by representing her as
+wanting natural affection to her only son, in my note at p. 162, where
+he says I have printed part of a Will, &c. And 3dly, tho' she was cut
+off in such a barbarous and unprecedented manner, yet she has fallen
+unlamented by me. I am likewise charged with having an affection to
+Puritanism; the reasons for which are, my giving the Life of a Puritan
+Bishop's Lady, which it seems need not have been done by me, had I not
+had a particular regard for her, since it had been done before by
+Goodwin who reprinted her Devotions. And not content with this, I have
+blemished my book with the memoirs of a Dissenting teacher's wife, and
+have been kind enough to heighten even the character given her by her
+indulgent husband: and that I am very fond of quoting Fox and Burnet
+upon all occasions. These are thought strong indications of the
+above-mentioned charge. It may be thought entirely unnecessary to answer
+any of the objections from Exeter, after having given you this Summary
+of my kind Friend's Candid Epistle; but to you, Sir, to whom I could
+disclose the very secrets of my soul, I will endeavour to say a word or
+two upon this subject, and make you my Confessor upon this occasion; and
+I will do it with as much sincerity, as if I lay on my death-bed. Before
+I was fourteen years old, I read over Fox's Acts and Monuments of the
+Church, and several of the best books of Polemical Divinity, which
+strongly fortified me in the Protestant Religion; and gave me the
+greatest abhorrence to Popery. And soon after I perused Mercurius
+Rusticus, The Eleventh Persecution, Lloyd, Walker's Sufferings of the
+Clergy, and many others, which gave me almost as bad an opinion of the
+Dissenters. But then I learned in my childhood _to live in Charity with
+all Men_, and I have used my best endeavours to put this doctrine in
+practice all my life long. I never thought ill, or quarrelled with any
+man merely because he had been educated in principles different to mine;
+and yet I have been acquainted with many papists, dissenters, &c. and if
+I found any of them learned, ingenuous, and modest, I always found my
+heart well-disposed for contracting a firm friendship with them: and
+notwithstanding that, I dare believe that all those people will, with
+joint consent, vouch for me, that I have ever been steady in my own
+principles.
+
+I can truly affirm that never any one engaged in such a work, with an
+honester heart, or executed it with more unbiassed integrity, than I
+have done. And indeed, I take the unkind censures passed upon me by the
+furious uncharitable zealots of both parties, to be the strongest proof
+of it. And after all, I dare challenge any man, whether Protestant,
+Papist, or Dissenter, Whig or Tory, (and I have drawn up and published
+memoirs of women who professed all those principles) to prove me guilty
+of partiality, or to shew that I have made any uncharitable reflections
+on any person, and whenever that is done, I will faithfully promise to
+make a public recantation. I wish, Sir, you would point out to me any
+one unbecoming word or expression which has fell from me on Bishop
+Burnet. Had I had the least inclination to have lessened his character,
+I did not want proper materials to have done it. I have in my possession
+two original letters from Bishop Gibson and Mr Norris of Bemerton, to
+Dr Charlett, which, if published, would lessen your too great esteem for
+him. And what, I beseech you, Sir, have I said in praise of Mrs Hopton
+and her pious and useful labours, which they do not well deserve, and
+which can possibly give any just offence to any good man? I dare not
+censure or condemn a good thing merely because it borders upon the
+Church of Rome. I rather rejoice that she retains any thing I can fairly
+approve. Should I attempt to do this, might I not condemn the greater
+part of our Liturgy, &c.? and should I not stand self-condemned for so
+doing? I cannot for my life perceive that I have said any thing of that
+excellent woman, which she does not merit; and I must beg leave to say
+that I think her letter to F. Turbeville deserves to be wrote in letters
+of gold, and ought to be carefully read and preserved by all
+Protestants. Mary Queen of Scots fell under my notice, no otherwise than
+as a learned woman. The affairs you mention would by no means suit my
+peaceable temper. I was too well acquainted with the warm disputes, and
+fierce engagement both of domestic and foreign writers on that head,
+once to touch upon the subject. And indeed, unless I had been the happy
+discoverer of some secret springs of action which would have given new
+information to the public, it would have been excessive folly in me to
+intermeddle in an affair of so tender a nature, and of so great
+importance.
+
+I have often blamed my dear friend Mr. Brome for destroying his valuable
+collections, but I now cease to wonder at it. He spent his leisure hours
+pleasantly and inoffensively, and when old age came on, which not only
+abates thirst, but oftentimes gives a disrelish to these and almost all
+other things, which do not help to make our passage into eternity more
+easy, he then destroyed them (I dare believe) in order to prevent the
+malicious reflections of an ill-natured world.
+
+I have always been a passionate lover of History and Antiquity,
+Biography, and Northern Literature: and as I have ever hated idleness,
+so I have in my time filled many hundred sheets with my useless
+scribble, the greater part of which I will commit to the flames shortly,
+to prevent their giving me any uneasiness in my last moments.[107]
+
+[May 22, 1753.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[106] Ballard's _Memoirs of Learned Ladies of Great Britain who have
+been celebrated for their writings or skill in the Learned Languages
+Arts & Sciences_, appeared at Oxford in 4to (1752) and 8vo (1775). It
+contains some sixty lives, the most noteworthy names being those of
+Queens Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland, Lady Jane Grey, Margaret Countess
+of Richmond (_the_ "Lady Margaret"), the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady
+Winchelsea, the two Countesses of Pembroke ("Sidney's sister" and Anne
+Clifford), Dame Juliana Barnes or Berners, Dryden's Anne Killigrew,
+Dorothy Pakington (the alleged author of _The Whole Duty of Man_), and
+"the matchless Orinda."
+
+[107] Perhaps a note should be added on "Mrs. Hopton" and "F.
+Turbe(r)ville." The former, born Susanna Harvey (1627-1709), was the
+wife of a Welsh judge, and wrote devotional works. The latter, Henry T.
+(d. 1678: the "F" of text is of course "Father"), was a writer of
+doctrinal and controversial manuals on the Roman side.
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)
+
+
+     The chief thing to add to what has been said of Gray in the
+     Introduction is something that may draw attention to a
+     curious feature of his letters, not there distinctly
+     noticed. Letters, it must be sufficiently seen even from
+     this little book, have a curious _variety_ of relation to
+     the characters, personal and literary, of their writers.
+     Sometimes they show us phases entirely or almost entirely
+     concealed in the published works; sometimes again, without
+     definitely revealing new aspects, they complete and enforce
+     the old; while, in yet a third, though perhaps the smallest,
+     class of instances, they are as it were results of the same
+     governing formula as that of the published works themselves,
+     the difference lying almost wholly in the subjects and in
+     the methods and circumstances of treatment. Gray belongs to
+     this last division. There is not, of course, in his letters
+     the same severity of discipline and restriction of
+     utterance, that we find in his poems. But that, in letters,
+     was impossible--at least in letters that should supply
+     tolerable reading. Yet the same general principle, which was
+     somewhat exaggerated in the phrase about his "never speaking
+     out," appears in them. There is always a certain restraint
+     (at least in all that have been published) and it would
+     probably have extended in proportion to others, however
+     little their subject might seem compatible with it. In what
+     we have it gives a curious _seasoning_--something which
+     preserves as well as flavours like salt or vinegar. Of those
+     which follow the first is an early one. Mason's apologetic
+     note is to the effect that it "may appear whimsical" but it
+     gives him an opportunity of remarking that Mr. Gray was
+     "extremely skilled in the customs of the ancient Romans,"
+     both utterances being characteristic, to some extent of the
+     time but to a greater of the writer. The second letter, to
+     Gray's most intimate friend Dr. Wharton, and more than a
+     quarter of a century later, is a good example of the
+     _variety_ of these epistles--scenery, literature, politics,
+     science, gossip and what not, being all dealt with.
+
+
+20. TO RICHARD WEST [EXTRACT]
+
+ROME, May, 1740.
+
+I am to-day just returned from Alba, a good deal fatigued; for you know
+the Appian is somewhat tiresome. We dined at Pompey's; he indeed was
+gone for a few days to his Tusculan, but, by the care of his Villicus,
+we made an admirable meal. We had the dugs of a pregnant sow, a peacock,
+a dish of thrushes, a noble scarus just fresh from the Tyrrhene, and
+some conchylia of the Lake with garum sauce: For my part I never eat
+better at Lucullus's table. We drank half-a-dozen cyathi a-piece of
+ancient Alban to Pholoe's health; and after bathing, and playing an hour
+at ball, we mounted our essedum again, and proceeded up the mount to the
+temple. The priests there entertained us with an account of a wonderful
+shower of bird's eggs that had fallen two days before, which had no
+sooner touched the ground, but they were converted into gudgeons; as
+also that, the night past, a dreadful voice had been heard out of the
+Adytum, which spoke Greek during a full half-hour, but nobody understood
+it. But quitting my Romanities, to your great joy and mine, let me tell
+you in plain English, that we come from Albano. The present town lies
+within the inclosure of Pompey's Villa in ruins. The Appian way runs
+through it, by the side of which, a little farther, is a large old
+tomb, with five pyramids upon it, which the learned suppose to be the
+burying-place of the family, because they do not know whose it can be
+else. But the vulgar assure you it is the sepulchre of the Curiatii, and
+by that name (such is their power) it goes. One drives to Castle
+Gandolfo, a house of the Pope's, situated on the top of one of the
+Collinette, that forms a brim to the basin, commonly called the Alban
+lake. It is seven miles round; and directly opposite to you, on the
+other side, rises the Mons Albanus, much taller than the rest, along
+whose side are still discoverable (not to common eyes) certain little
+ruins of the old Alba Longa. They had need be very little, as having
+been nothing but ruins ever since the days of Tullus Hostilius. On its
+top is a house of the Constable Colonna's, where stood the temple of
+Jupiter Latialis. At the foot of the hill Gandolfo, are the famous
+outlets of the lake, built with hewn stone, a mile and a half under
+ground. Livy you know, amply informs us of the foolish occasion of this
+expence, and gives me this opportunity of displaying all my erudition,
+that I may appear considerable in your eyes. This is the prospect from
+one window of the palace. From another you have the whole Campagna, the
+City, Antium, and the Tyrrhene sea (twelve miles distant) so
+distinguishable, that you may see the vessels sailing upon it. All this
+is charming. Mr. Walpole says, our memory sees more than our eyes in
+this country. Which is extremely true; since, for realities, Windsor or
+Richmond Hill is infinitely preferable to Albano or Frescati. I am now
+at home, and going to the window to tell you it is the most beautiful of
+Italian nights, which, in truth, are but just begun (so backward has the
+spring been here, and every where else, they say) There is a moon! there
+are stars for you! Do not you hear the fountain? Do not you smell the
+orange flowers? That building yonder is the convent of S. Isidore; and
+that eminence, with the cypress trees and pines upon it, the top of M.
+Quirinal. This is all true, and yet my prospect is not two hundred yards
+in length.
+
+
+21. TO WHARTON
+
+Dear Doctor
+
+Whatever my pen may do, I am sure my thoughts expatiate nowhere oftener
+or with more pleasure, than to Old-Park. I hope you have made my peace
+with Miss Deborah. it is certain, whether her name were in my letter or
+not, she was as present to my memory, as the rest of the little family,
+& I desire you would present her with two kisses in my name, & one
+a-piece to all the others: for I shall take the liberty to kiss them all
+(great & small) as you are to be my proxy.
+
+In spite of the rain, w^ch I think continued with very short intervals
+till the beginning of this month, & quite effaced the summer from the
+year, I made a shift to pass May & June not disagreeably in Kent. I was
+surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury, which (I know not
+why) had not struck me in the same manner before. The whole country is a
+rich and well-cultivated garden, orchards, cherry-grounds, hop-gardens,
+intermix'd with corn & frequent villages, gentle risings cover'd with
+wood, and everywhere the Thames and Medway breaking in upon the
+Landscape with all their navigation. It was indeed owing to the bad
+weather, that the whole scene was dress'd in that tender emerald-green,
+w^ch one usually sees only for a fortnight in the opening of spring, &
+this continued till I left the country. My residence was eight miles
+east of Canterbury in a little quiet valley on the skirts of
+Barhamdown. In these parts the whole soil is chalk, and whenever it
+holds up, in half an hour it is dry enough to walk out. I took the
+opportunity of three or four days fine weather to go into the Isle of
+Thanet, saw Margate (w^ch is Bartholomew-Fair by the sea side),
+Ramsgate, & other places there, and so came by Sandwich, Deal, Dover,
+Folkstone, & Hithe, back again. The coast is not like Hartlepool: there
+are no rocks, but only chalky cliffs of no great height, till you come
+to Dover. There indeed they are noble & picturesque, and the opposite
+coasts of France begin to bound your view, w^ch was left before to range
+unlimited by anything but the horizon: yet it is by no means a
+_shipless_ sea, but everywhere peopled with white sails & vessels of all
+sizes in motion. And take notice (except in the Isle, w^ch is all
+corn-fields, and has very little inclosure) there are in all places
+hedgerows & tall trees even within a few yards of the beach.
+Particularly Hithe stands on an eminence cover'd with wood. I shall
+confess we had fires of a night (ay, & a day too) several times even in
+June: but don't go & take advantage of this, for it was the most
+untoward year that ever I remember.
+
+Your Friend Rousseau (I doubt) grows tired of M^r Davenport and
+Derbyshire. He has picked a quarrel with David Hume & writes him letters
+of 14 pages Folio upbraiding him of all his _noirceurs_. Take one only
+as a specimen, he says, that at Calais they chanced to sleep in the same
+room together, & that he overheard David talking in his sleep, and
+saying, _Ah! Je le tiens, ce Jean-Jacques la._ In short (I fear) for
+want of persecution & admiration (for these are real complaints) he will
+go back to the Continent.
+
+What shall I say to you about the Ministry? I am as angry as a
+Common-council Man of London about my L^d Chatham: but a little more
+patient, & will hold my tongue till the end of the year. In the mean
+time I do mutter in secret & to you, that to quit the house of Commons,
+his natural strength; to sap his own popularity & grandeur (which no one
+but himself could have done) by assuming a foolish title; & to hope that
+he could win by it and attach to him a Court, that hate him, & will
+dismiss him, as soon as ever they dare, was the weakest thing, that ever
+was done by so great a Man. Had it not been for this, I should have
+rejoiced at the breach between him & L^d Temple, & at the union between
+him & the D: of Grafton & M^r Conway: but patience! we shall see!
+St:[108] perhaps is in the country (for he hoped for a month's leave of
+absence) and if you see him, you will learn more than I can tell you.
+
+Mason is at Aston. He is no longer so anxious about his wife's health,
+as he was, tho' I find she still has a cough, & moreover I find she is
+not with child: but he made such a bragging, how could one choose but
+believe him.
+
+When I was in town, I mark'd in my pocket-book the utmost limits &
+divisions of the two columns in your Thermometer, and asked Mr. Ayscough
+the Instrument-Maker on Ludgate Hill, what scales they were. He
+immediately assured me, that one was Fahrenheit's, & shew'd me one
+exactly so divided. The other he took for Reaumur's, but, as he said
+there were different scales of his contrivance, he could not exactly
+tell, w^ch of them it was. Your Brother told me, you wanted to know,
+who wrote Duke Wharton's life in the Biography: I think, it is chiefly
+borrowed from a silly book enough call'd _Memoirs of that Duke_: but who
+put it together there, no one can inform me. The only person certainly
+known to write in that vile collection (I mean these latter volumes) is
+D^r Nicholls, who was expell'd here for stealing books.
+
+Have you read the _New Bath-Guide_?[109] it is the only thing in
+fashion, & is a new & original kind of humour. Miss Prue's Conversion I
+doubt you will paste down, as S^r W: S^t Quintyn did, before he carried
+it to his daughter. Yet I remember you all read _Crazy Tales_[110]
+without pasting. Buffon's first collection of Monkeys are come out (it
+makes the 14^th volume) something, but not much, to my edification: for
+he is pretty well acquainted with their persons, but not with their
+manners.
+
+I shall be glad to hear, how far M^rs Ettrick has succeeded, & when you
+see an end to her troubles. my best respects to Mrs. Wharton, &
+compliments to all your family: I will not name them, least I should
+affront any body. Adieu, dear S^r,
+
+I am most sincerely yours,
+
+TG:
+
+August 26, 1766, Pembroke College.
+
+Mr. Brown is gone to see his Brother near Margate. When is L^d Str:[111]
+to be married? If M^r and M^rs Jonathan are with you, I desire my
+compliments.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[108] "St." is Richard Stonhewer, a Fellow of Peterhouse, secretary to
+the Duke of Grafton, and a man of considerable, though not public,
+importance in politics.
+
+[109] Anstey's--referred to in the Introduction.
+
+[110] By Sterne's friend, John Hall Stevenson.
+
+[111] Lord Strathmore.
+
+
+
+
+HORACE WALPOLE (1717-1797)
+
+[AND W. M. THACKERAY].
+
+
+     As much has been already said of Horace Walpole's letters,
+     but practically nothing of his other works except his novel
+     and his play, something more may be added here to show that
+     he was not _merely_ a "trifler." His private press at
+     "Strawberry" was mainly a means of amusement to him, like a
+     billiard-room or a tennis-court. But it provided some useful
+     books--such as editions of Anthony Hamilton's _Memoirs of
+     Grammont_, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's _Life_ and of part
+     of Gray's _Poems_. He had neither historic knowledge nor
+     historic sense enough to deal satisfactorily with such a
+     subject as _Historic Doubts on Richard III._, though the
+     subject itself was quite worth dealing with. But his
+     _Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors_, his _Anecdotes of
+     Painting in England_, and his _Catalogue of Engravers_ are
+     not without value; and he could usefully handle the history
+     of his own time, with proper corrections for his prejudices,
+     etc. He was weakest of all as a literary critic: and his
+     dealings with Chatterton were most unfortunate, though the
+     mischief done was not intentional, and might not have been
+     serious in any other case. These things have been said with
+     a definite purpose--that of showing that Horace's interests,
+     if seldom deep, were unusually wide. Now though width of
+     interest is not, as Cowper's case shows, indispensable to
+     goodness of letter-writing, it is a very great qualification
+     for it, as giving to the result variety, colour, and "bite."
+     At the same time, unless one had space on a very different
+     scale from any possible here, it would be _im_possible to
+     illustrate this "extensive curiosity" as they called it
+     then: and Horace ought to be shown here in his _most_ native
+     element as a chronicler of "society." I have thought it
+     worth while to subjoin for comparison Thackeray's wonderful
+     _pastiche_ in _The Virginians_, which is almost better
+     Horace than Horace himself.[112]
+
+
+22. TO THE COUNTESS OF OSSORY
+
+ARLINGTON STREET,
+April 31. 1773
+
+It is most true, madam, that I did purpose to regale myself with a visit
+to Ampthill; but this winter, which has trod hard upon last week's
+summer, blunted my intention for a while, though revivable in finer
+weather. Oh! but I had another reason for changing my mind; you are
+leaving Ampthill, and I do not mean only to write my name in your
+park-keeper's book. Yes, in spite of your ladyship's low spirited mood,
+you are coming from Ampthill, and you are to be at Strawberry Hill
+to-morrow se'nnight. You may not be in the secret, but Lord Ossory and I
+have settled it, and you are to be pawned to me while he is at
+Newmarket. He told me you certainly would if I asked it, and as they
+used to say in ancient writ, I do beg it upon the knees of my heart.
+Nay, it is unavoidable; for though a lady's word may be ever so
+crackable, you cannot have the conscience to break your husband's word,
+so I depend upon it. I have asked Mr. Craufurd to meet you, but begged
+he would refuse me, that I might be sure of his coming. Mrs Meynel has
+taken another year's lease of her house, so you probably, madam, will
+not be tired of me for the livelong day for the whole time you shall
+honour my mansion. Your face will be well and your fever gone a week
+before to-morrow se'nnight, and you will look as well as ever you did in
+your life, that is, as you have done lately, which is better than ever
+you did before. You must not, in truth, expect that I your shepherd
+should be quite so fit to figure in a fan mount. Besides the gout for
+six months, which makes some flaws in the bloom of elderly Arcadians, I
+have been so far from keeping sheep for the last ten days, that I have
+kept nothing but bad hours; and have been such a rake that I put myself
+in mind of a poor old cripple that I saw formerly at Hogarth's auction:
+he bid for the Rake's Progress, saying, "I will buy my own progress,"
+though he looked as if he had no more title to it than I have, but by
+limping and sitting up. In short, I have been at four balls since
+yesterday se'nnight, though I had the prudence not to stay supper at
+Lord Stanley's. That festival was very expensive, for it is the fashion
+now to make romances rather than balls. In the hall was a band of French
+horns and clarionets in laced uniforms and feathers. The dome of the
+staircase was beautifully illuminated with coloured glass lanthorns; in
+the ante-room was a bevy of vestals in white habits, making tea; in the
+next, a drapery of sarcenet, that with a very funereal air crossed the
+chimney, and depended in vast festoons over the sconces. The third
+chamber's doors were heightened with candles in gilt vases, and the
+ballroom was formed into an oval with benches above each other, not
+unlike pews, and covered with red serge, above which were arbours of
+flowers, red and green pilasters, more sarcenet, and Lord March's
+glasses, which he had lent, as an upholsterer asked Lord Stanley 300l.
+for the loan of some. He had burst open the side of the wall to build an
+orchestra, with a pendant mirror to reflect the dancers, a la Guisnes;
+and the musicians were in scarlet robes, like the candle-snuffers who
+represent the senates of Venice at Drury Lane. There were two more
+chambers at which I never arrived for the crowd. The seasons, danced by
+himself, the younger Storer, the Duc de Lauzun and another, the youngest
+Miss Stanley, Miss Poole, the youngest Wrottesley and another Miss, who
+is likewise anonymous in my memory, were in errant shepherdly dresses
+without invention, and Storer and Miss Wrottesley in banians with furs,
+for winter, cock and hen. In six rooms below were magnificent suppers. I
+was not quite so sober last night at Mons. de Guisnes', where the
+evening began with a ball of children, from eighteen to four years old.
+They danced amazingly well, yet disappointed me, so many of them were
+ugly; but Dr. Delawarr's two eldest daughters and the Ancaster infanta
+performed a pas de trois as well as Mlle. Heinel, and the two eldest
+were pretty; yet I promise you, madam, the next age will be a thousand
+degrees below the present in beauty. The most interesting part was to
+observe the anxiety of the mothers while their children danced or
+supped; they supped at ten in three rooms. I should not omit telling you
+that the Vernons, especially the eldest, were not the homeliest part of
+the show. The former quadrilles then came again upon the stage, and
+Harry Conway the younger was so astonished at the agility of Mrs.
+Hobart's bulk, that he said he was sure she must be hollow. The tables
+were again spread in five rooms, and at past two in the morning we went
+to supper. To excuse _we_, I must plead that both the late and present
+chancellor, and the solemn Lord Lyttleton, my predecessors by some
+years, stayed as late as I did--and in good sooth the watchman went four
+as my chairman knocked at my door.
+
+Such is the result of good resolutions! I determined during my illness
+to have my colt's tooth drawn, and lo! I have cut four new in a week.
+Well! at least I am as grave as a judge, looked as rosy as Lord
+Lyttleton, and much soberer than my Lord Chancellor. To shew some marks
+of grace, I shall give up the opera, (indeed it is very bad) and go and
+retake my doctor's degrees among the dowagers at Lady Blandford's; and
+intending to have no more diversions than I have news to tell your
+ladyship, I think you shall not hear from me again till we meet, as I
+shall think it, in heaven.
+
+
+23. (_Thackeray imitating_). TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY
+
+ARLINGTON STREET, Friday night.
+
+I have come away, child, for a day or two from my devotions to our Lady
+of Strawberry. Have I not been on my knees to her these three weeks, and
+aren't the poor old joints full of rheumatism? A fit took me that I
+would pay London a visit, that I would go to Vauxhall and Ranelagh.
+_Quoi!_ May I not have my rattle as well as other elderly babies?
+Suppose, after being so long virtuous, I take a fancy to cakes and ale,
+shall your reverence say nay to me? George Selwyn and Tony Storer and
+your humble servant took boat at Westminster t'other night. Was it
+Tuesday?--no, Tuesday I was with their Graces of Norfolk, who are just
+from Tunbridge--it was Wednesday. How should I know?
+
+Wasn't I dead drunk with a whole pint of lemonade I took at White's?
+
+The Norfolk folk had been entertaining me on Tuesday with the account of
+a young savage Iroquois, Choctaw, or Virginian, who has lately been
+making a little noise in our quarter of the globe. He is an offshoot of
+that disreputable family of Esmond-Castlewood, of whom all the men are
+gamblers and spendthrifts, and all the women--well, I shan't say the
+word, lest Lady Ailesbury should be looking over your shoulder. Both the
+late lords, my father told me, were in his pay, and the last one, a beau
+of Queen Anne's reign, from a viscount advanced to be an earl through
+the merits and intercession of his notorious old sister Bernstein, late
+Tusher, _nee_ Esmond--a great beauty, too, of her day, a favourite of
+the old Pretender. She sold his secrets to my papa, who paid her for
+them; and being nowise particular in her love for the Stuarts, came over
+to the august Hanoverian house at present reigning over us. "Will Horace
+Walpole's tongue never stop scandal?" says your wife over your shoulder.
+I kiss your ladyship's hand. I am dumb. The Bernstein is a model of
+virtue. She had no good reasons for marrying her father's chaplain. Many
+of the nobility omit the marriage altogether. She _wasn't_ ashamed of
+being Mrs. Tusher, and didn't take a German _Baroncino_ for a second
+husband, whom nobody out of Hanover ever saw. The Yarmouth bears no
+malice. Esther and Vashti are very good friends, and have been cheating
+each other at Tunbridge at cards all the summer.
+
+"And what has all this to do with the Iroquois?" says your ladyship. The
+Iroquois has been at Tunbridge, too--not cheating, perhaps, but winning
+vastly. They say he has bled Lord March of thousands--Lord March, by
+whom so much blood hath been shed, that he has quarrelled with
+everybody, fought with everybody, rode over everybody, been fallen in
+love with by everybody's wife except Mr. Conway's, and _not_ excepting
+her present Majesty, the Countess of England, Scotland, France and
+Ireland, Queen of Walmoden and Yarmouth, whom heaven preserve to us.
+
+You know an offensive little creature _de par le monde_, one Jack
+Morris, who skips in and out of all the houses of London. When we were
+at Vauxhall, Mr. Jack gave us a nod under the shoulder of a pretty young
+fellow enough, on whose arm he was leaning, and who appeared hugely
+delighted with the enchantments of the garden. Lord, how he stared at
+the fireworks! Gods, how he huzzayed at the singing of a horrible
+painted wench who shrieked the ears off my head! A twopenny string of
+glass beads and a strip of tawdry cloth are treasures in Iroquois-land,
+and our savage valued them accordingly.
+
+A buzz went about the place that this was the fortunate youth. He won
+three hundred at White's last night very genteelly from Rockingham and
+my precious nephew, and here he was bellowing and huzzaying over the
+music so as to do you good to hear. I do not love a puppet-show, but I
+love to treat children to one, Miss Conway! I present your ladyship my
+compliments, and hope we shall go and see the dolls together.
+
+When the singing-woman came down from her throne, Jack Morris must
+introduce my Virginian to her. I saw him blush up to the eyes, and make
+her, upon my word, a very fine bow, such as I had no idea was practised
+in wigwams. "There is a certain _jenny squaw_ about her, and that's why
+the savage likes her," George said--a joke certainly not as brilliant as
+a firework. After which it seemed to me that the savage and the savagess
+retired together.
+
+Having had a great deal too much to eat and drink three hours before, my
+partners must have chicken and rack-punch at Vauxhall, where George fell
+asleep straightway, and for my sins I must tell Tony Storer what I knew
+about this Virginian's amiable family, especially some of the
+Bernstein's antecedents and the history of another elderly beauty of the
+family, a certain Lady Maria, who was _au mieux_ with the late Prince of
+Wales. What did I say? I protest not half of what I knew, and of course
+not a tenth part of what I was going to tell, for who should start out
+upon us but my savage, this time quite red in the face; and in his _war
+paint_. The wretch had been drinking fire-water in the next box!
+
+He cocked his hat, clapped his hand to his sword, asked which of the
+gentlemen was it that was maligning his family? so that I was obliged to
+entreat him not to make such a noise, lest he should wake my friend Mr.
+George Selwyn. And I added, "I assure you, sir, I had no idea that you
+were near me, and I most sincerely apologize for giving you pain."
+
+The Huron took his hand off his tomahawk at this pacific rejoinder, made
+a bow not ungraciously, said he could not, of course, ask more than an
+apology from a gentleman of my age (_Merci, Monsieur!_) and, hearing the
+name of Mr. Selwyn, made another bow to George, and said he had a letter
+to him from Lord March, which he had had the ill-fortune to mislay.
+George has put him up for the club, it appears, in conjunction with
+March, and no doubt these three lambs will fleece each other. Meanwhile,
+my pacified savage sat down with us, and _buried the hatchet_ in another
+bowl of punch, for which these gentlemen must call. Heaven help us! 'Tis
+eleven o'clock, and here comes Bedson with my gruel!
+
+H. W.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[112] There is an amicable dispute among Thackerayans whether this or
+the imitation-_Spectator_ paper in _Esmond_ is the more wonderful of
+their joint kind. To facilitate this comparison the letter part (for
+there is one) of that paper will be given here under Thackeray's own
+name.
+
+
+
+
+TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT (1721-1771)
+
+
+     Smollett's reputation has been of course always mainly,
+     indeed almost wholly, that of a novelist, though his
+     miscellaneous work is of no small merit. But that he wrote
+     his best novel _in_ letters and that perhaps it is one of
+     the best so written, has been mentioned. His _Travels_ are
+     also of the letter-kind--especially of the
+     ill-tempered-letter-kind. Of his actual correspondence we
+     have not much. But the following has always seemed to the
+     present writer an admirable and agreeably characteristic
+     example. Smollett's outwardly surly but inwardly kindly
+     temper, and his command of phrase ("great Cham of
+     literature" has, as we say now, "stuck") both appear in it:
+     and the matter is interesting. We have, so far as I
+     remember, no record of any interview between Johnson and
+     Smollett, though they must have met. They were both Tories,
+     and Johnson wrote in the _Critical Review_ which Smollett
+     edited. But Johnson's gibes at Scotland are not likely to
+     have conciliated Smollett: and there was just that
+     combination of likeness and difference between the two men
+     which (especially as the one was as typically English as the
+     other was Scotch) generates incompatibility. How
+     victoriously Wilkes got over Johnson's personal dislike to
+     him all readers of Boswell know: and it is one of the most
+     amusing passages in the book. On this occasion, too, he did
+     what was asked of him. "Frank" had not been _pressed_, but
+     had joined for some reason of his own. However, he accepted
+     his discharge and returned to his master, staying till that
+     master's death.
+
+
+24. TO JOHN WILKES, ESQ.
+
+CHELSEA, 16th March, 1759.
+
+Dear Sir
+
+I am again your petitioner, in behalf of that great CHAM of literature,
+Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has
+been pressed on board the Stag frigate, Captain Angel, and our
+lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad, of
+a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in his throat,
+which renders him very unfit for His Majesty's service. You know what
+matter of animosity the said Johnson has against you: and I dare say you
+desire no other opportunity of resenting it, than that of laying him
+under an obligation. He was humble enough to desire my assistance on
+this occasion, though he and I were never cater-cousins; and I gave him
+to understand that I would make application to my friend Mr. Wilkes,
+who, perhaps, by his interest with Dr. Hay and Mr. Elliot, might be able
+to procure the discharge of his lacquey. It would be superfluous to say
+more on this subject, which I leave to your own consideration; but I
+cannot let slip this opportunity of declaring that I am, with the most
+inviolable esteem and attachment, dear Sir, your affectionate, obliged,
+humble servant,
+
+T. SMOLLETT.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800)
+
+
+     It was necessary to say a good deal about Cowper's letters
+     in the Introduction, but it would hardly do to stint him of
+     some further comment. It will be a most unfortunate evidence
+     of degradation in English literary taste if he ever loses
+     the position there assigned to him, and practically
+     acknowledged by all the best judges for the last century.
+     For there is certainly no other epistoler who has displayed
+     such consummate (if also such unconscious) art in making the
+     most out of the least. Of course people who must have noise,
+     and bustle, and "importance" of matter, and so forth, may be
+     dissatisfied. But their dissatisfaction convicts not Cowper
+     but themselves: and the conviction is not for want of Art,
+     but for want of appreciation of Art. Now this last is one of
+     the most terrible faults to be found in any human creature.
+     Not everybody can be an artist: but everybody who is not
+     deficient to this or that extent in sense--to use that word
+     in its widest and best interpretation, for understanding and
+     feeling both--can enjoy an artist's work. Nor is there any
+     more important function of the often misused word
+     "education" than "bringing out" this sense when it is
+     dormant, and training and developing it when it is brought
+     out. And few things are more useful for exercise in this way
+     than the under-current of artistry in Cowper's "chit-chat."
+     His letters are so familiar that it is vain to aim at any
+     great originality in selecting them. The following strikes
+     me as an excellent example. What more trite than references
+     to increased expense of postage (rather notably topical just
+     now though!) and remarks on a greenhouse? And what less
+     trite--except to tritical tastes and intellects--than this
+     letter?
+
+
+25. TO THE REV. JOHN NEWTON
+
+Sept. 18. 1784.
+
+My dear Friend,
+
+Following your good example, I lay before me a sheet of my largest
+paper. It was this moment fair and unblemished but I have begun to blot
+it, and having begun, am not likely to cease till I have spoiled it. I
+have sent you many a sheet that in my judgment of it has been very
+unworthy of your acceptance, but my conscience was in some measure
+satisfied by reflecting, that if it were good for nothing, at the same
+time it cost you nothing, except the trouble of reading it. But the case
+is altered now. You must pay a solid price for frothy matter, and though
+I do not absolutely pick your pocket, yet you lose your money, and, as
+the saying is, are never the wiser; a saying literally fulfilled to the
+reader of my epistles.
+
+My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of
+being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the
+calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat
+than we ever find it in summer; when, the winds being generally brisk,
+we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without
+being at the same time incommoded by it. But now I sit with all the
+windows and the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every
+flower in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We
+keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I should hardly hear more of
+their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of
+mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get
+out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to
+my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters
+are delightful,--at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the
+roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I
+know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical, save and
+except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and
+fowls please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of
+keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for
+the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is
+no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black beetle, and beetles
+indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I have no objection to any
+of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever key they sing, from the gnat's
+fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all. Seriously
+however it strikes me as a very observable instance of providential
+kindness to man, that such an exact accord has been contrived between
+his ear, and the sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is
+almost every moment visited. All the world is sensible of the
+uncomfortable effect that certain sounds have upon the nerves, and
+consequently upon the spirits:--and if a sinful world had been filled
+with such as would have curdled the blood, and have made the sense of
+hearing a perpetual inconvenience, I do not know that we should have had
+a right to complain. But now the fields, the woods, the gardens have
+each their concert, and the ear of man is for ever regaled by creatures
+who seem only to please themselves. Even the ears that are deaf to the
+Gospel, are continually entertained, though without knowing it, by
+sounds for which they are solely indebted to its author. There is
+somewhere in infinite space a world that does not roll within the
+precincts of mercy, and as it is reasonable, and even scriptural, to
+suppose that there is music in Heaven, in those dismal regions perhaps
+the reverse of it is found; tones so dismal, as to make woe itself more
+insupportable, and to acuminate[113] even despair. But my paper
+admonishes me in good time to draw the reins, and to check the descent
+of my fancy into deeps, with which she is but too familiar.
+
+Our best love attends you both, with yours,
+
+_Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus_,
+
+W. C.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[113] "Acuminate" = "sharpen," is a perfectly good word in itself, but
+perhaps does not so perfectly suit "despair," which crushes rather than
+pierces.
+
+
+
+
+SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845)
+
+
+     It has been said of Sydney Smith that he was not only a
+     humourist, but a "good-humourist," and this is undoubtedly
+     true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual custom,
+     sometimes rather acidulated his good humour; but anybody
+     possessed of the noun, with the least allowance of the
+     adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which the
+     almost Radical reformer of _Peter Plymley's Letters_ in 1807
+     became the almost Tory and wholly conservative maintainer of
+     ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon Singleton
+     thirty years later.
+
+     Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated kind: but
+     we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence, also
+     agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing. Whether Sydney
+     (his friends always abbreviated him thus, and he accepted
+     the Christian name) describes the makeshifts of his
+     Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset one;
+     whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums on
+     pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given him a
+     whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time"--he is
+     always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do not go
+     to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive
+     sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves
+     as does that of some--perhaps most--professional jokers:
+     neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it
+     bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for
+     they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in
+     still shorter _flashes_ such as those glanced at above; as
+     the grave proposition that "the information of very plain
+     women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting
+     no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short
+     newspaper paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard work
+     with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous this
+     season and in great force, from the irregular supply of
+     rain." But the following specimens are fairly
+     representative. They were written at an interval of about
+     ten years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe
+     Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who
+     began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming
+     Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady Rachel," the
+     famous wife of the person who suffered for the Rye House
+     plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady Russell, but
+     Miss Berry had written a _Life_ of her under her maiden
+     name). Sydney's politics show in his allusion to the
+     assassination of the Duc de Berri, son of Charles X. of
+     France (who had, however, not then come to the throne); in
+     his infinitely greater sorrow for the dismissal of the
+     mildly Liberal minister Decazes; and in his spleen at the
+     supporters of the English Tory government of Lord Liverpool.
+     (The "little plot" was Thistlewood's). In the second letter
+     the "hotel" is his new parsonage in Somerset: "Bowood," Lord
+     Lansdowne's Wiltshire house, a great Whig rallying place. I
+     suppose "Sea-shore Calcott" is Sir A. W. Calcott the
+     painter. "Luttrell" (Henry), a talker and versifier very
+     well known in his own day, but of less enduring reputation
+     than some others. "Napier's Book," the brilliant if somewhat
+     partisan _History of the Peninsular War_. I am not quite
+     certain in which of two senses Sydney uses the word
+     _caractere_. As ought to be well known this does not exactly
+     correspond to our "character"--but most commonly means
+     "temper" or "disposition." It has, however, a peculiar
+     technical meaning of "official description" or "estimate"
+     which would suit Sir William Napier well. The Napiers were
+     "kittle cattle" from the official point of view.
+
+
+26. TO MISS BERRY
+
+FOSTON, Feb 27th, 1820.
+
+I thank you very much for the entertainment I have received from your
+book. I should however have been afraid to marry such a woman as Lady
+Rachel; it would have been too awful. There are pieces of china very
+fine and beautiful, but never intended for daily use....
+
+I have hardly slept out of Foston since I saw you. God send I may be
+still an animal, and not a vegetable! but I am a little uneasy at this
+season for sprouting and rural increase, for I fear I should have
+undergone the metamorphose so common in country livings. I shall go to
+town about the end of March; it will be completely empty, and the drugs
+that remain will be entirely occupied about hustings and
+returning-officers.
+
+Commerce and manufacturers are still in a frightful state of stagnation.
+
+    No foreign barks in British ports are seen,
+    Stuff'd to the water's edge with velveteen,
+    Or bursting with big bales of bombazine;
+    No distant climes demand our corduroy,
+    Unmatch'd habiliment for man and boy;
+    No fleets of fustian quit the British shore,
+    The cloth-creating engines cease to roar,
+    Still is that loom which breech'd the world before.
+
+I am very sorry for the little fat Duke de Berri, but infinitely more so
+for the dismissal of De Cases,--a fatal measure.
+
+I must not die without seeing Paris. Figure to yourself what a horrid
+death,--to die without seeing Paris! I think I could make something of
+this in a tragedy, so as to draw tears from Donna Agnes and yourself.
+Where are you going to? When do you return? Why do you go at all? Is
+Paris more agreeable than London?
+
+We have had a little plot here in a hay-loft. God forbid anybody should
+be murdered! but, if I were to turn assassin, it should not be of five
+or six Ministers, who are placed where they are by the folly of the
+country gentlemen, but of the hundred thousand squires, to whose
+stupidity and folly such an Administration owes its existence.
+
+Ever your friend,
+
+SYDNEY SMITH.
+
+
+27. TO N. FAZAKERLY, ESQ.
+
+COMBE FLOREY, October, 1829.
+
+Dear Fazakerly,
+
+I don't know anybody who would be less affronted at being called
+hare-brained than our friend who has so tardily conveyed my message, and
+I am afraid now he has only given you a part of it. The omission appears
+to be, that I had set up an hotel on the Western road, that it would be
+opened next spring, and I hoped for the favour of yours and Mrs.
+Fazakerly's patronage. "Well-aired beds, neat wines, careful drivers,
+etc. etc."
+
+I shall have very great pleasure in coming to see you, and I quite agree
+in the wisdom of postponing that event till the rural Palladios and
+Vitruvii are chased away; I have fourteen of them here every day. The
+country is perfectly beautiful, and my parsonage the prettiest place in
+it.
+
+I was at Bowood last week: the only persons there were seashore Calcott
+and his wife,--two very sensible, agreeable people. Luttrell came over
+for the day; he was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of
+veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in
+vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on
+dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic
+objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into
+better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of
+what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same kind he
+has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually and
+justly elevated the species. I am perhaps making too much of this; but
+the failures of a man of sense are always painful.
+
+I quite agree about Napier's book. I do[114] not think that any[114] man
+would venture to write so true, bold, and honest a book; it gave me a
+high idea of his understanding, and makes me very anxious about his
+_caractere_
+
+Ever yours,
+
+SYDNEY SMITH.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[114] One would expect either "did" or "other": but the actual
+combination is a very likely slip of pen or press.
+
+
+
+
+SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
+
+
+     Since this little book was undertaken it has been announced,
+     truly or not, that the bulk of Scott's autograph letters has
+     been bought by a fortunate and wise man of letters for the
+     sum of L1500. Neither life nor literature can ever be
+     expressed in money value: but if one had L1500 to spend on
+     something not directly necessary, it is possible to imagine
+     a very large number of less satisfactory purchases. For as
+     was briefly suggested in the Introduction, Scott's
+     letters--while saturated with that singular humanity and
+     nobility of character in which he has hardly a rival among
+     authors of whom we know much--are distinctly remarkable from
+     the purely literary point of view. His published work, both
+     in verse and prose, has been accused (with what amount of
+     justice we will not here trouble ourselves to discuss)--of
+     carelessness in style and art. No such charge could possibly
+     be brought against his letters, which hit the happy mean
+     between slovenliness and artificial elaboration in a fashion
+     that could hardly be bettered. The great variety of his
+     correspondents, too, provides an additional attraction: for
+     letters indited to the same person are apt to show a certain
+     monotony. And Scott is equal to any and every occasion. Here
+     as elsewhere the "Diary" drains off a certain proportion of
+     matter: but chiefly for the latest period and in
+     circumstances scarcely happy enough for letters themselves.
+
+     The following letter was selected because of its admirable
+     treatment of a theme--the behaviour, responsibility, and
+     general _status_ of Authors as objects of public
+     judgment--on which an infinite amount of deplorable and
+     disgusting nonsense has been talked and written. It starts,
+     as will be seen, with the quarrel between Lord and Lady
+     Byron--and then generalises. Not many things show Scott's
+     golden equity and fairness better. He is perhaps "a little
+     kind" to Campbell, who was, one fears, an extra-irritable
+     specimen of the irritable race: but this is venial. And
+     probably he did not mean the stigma which might be inferred
+     from the conjunction of "Aphra _and_ Orinda." They were
+     certainly both of Charles II.'s time: but while poor Aphra
+     was, if not wholly vicious, far from virtuous, the
+     "matchless Orinda" (Katherine Philips) bears no stain on her
+     character.
+
+
+28. TO JOANNA BAILLIE
+
+(End of April 1816)
+
+My dear friend,
+
+I am glad you are satisfied with my reasons for declining a direct
+interference with Lord B[yron]. I have not, however, been quite idle,
+and as an old seaman have tried to go by a side wind when I had not the
+means of going before it, and this will be so far plain to you when I
+say that I have every reason to believe the good intelligence is true
+that a separation is signed between Lord and Lady Byron. If I am not as
+angry as you have good reason to expect every thinking and feeling man
+to be, it is from deep sorrow and regret that a man possessed of such
+noble talents should so utterly and irretrievably lose himself. In
+short, I believe the thing to be as you state it, and therefore Lord
+Byron is the object of anything rather than indignation. It is a cruel
+pity that such high talents should have been joined to a mind so wayward
+and incapable of seeking control where alone it is to be found, in the
+quiet discharge of domestic duties and filling up in peace and affection
+his station in society. The idea of his ultimately resisting that which
+should be fair and honourable to Lady B. did not come within my view of
+his character--at least of his natural character; but I hear that, as
+you intimated, he has had execrable advisers. I hardly know a more
+painful object of consideration than a man of genius in such a
+situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation, and become
+like pigs, familiarised with the filthy elements in which they grovel;
+but it is impossible that a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often
+feel the want of that which he has forfeited--the fair esteem of those
+by whom genius most naturally desires to be admired and cherished.
+
+I am much obliged to Mrs. Baillie for excluding me in her general
+censure of authors; but I should have hoped for a more general spirit of
+toleration from my good friend, who had in her own family and under her
+own eye such an exception to her general censure--unless, indeed (which
+may not be far from the truth), she supposes that female genius is more
+gentle and tractable, though as high in tone and spirit as that of the
+masculine sex. But the truth is, I believe, we will find a great
+equality when the different habits of the sexes and the temptations they
+are exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early flattered and
+coaxed, and told they are fitted for the higher regions of genius and
+unfit for anything else,--that they are a superior kind of automaton and
+ought to move by different impulses than others,--indulge their friends
+and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that worthy
+knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And then, if our man of genius
+escapes this temptation, how is he to parry the opposition of the
+blockheads who join all their hard heads and horns together to butt him
+out of the ordinary pasture, goad him back to Parnassus, and "bid him
+on the barren mountain starve." It is amazing how far this goes, if a
+man will let it go, in turning him out of the ordinary course of life
+into the stream of odd bodies, so that authors come to be regarded as
+tumblers, who are expected to go to church in a summerset, because they
+sometimes throw a Catherine-wheel for the amusement of the public. A man
+even told me at an election, thinking I believe he was saying a severe
+thing, that I was a poet, and therefore that the subject we were
+discussing lay out of my way. I answered as quietly as I could, that I
+did not apprehend my having written poetry rendered me incapable of
+speaking common sense in prose, and that I requested the audience to
+judge of me not by the nonsense I might have written for their
+amusement, but by the sober sense I was endeavouring to speak for their
+information, and only expected [of] them, in case I had ever happened to
+give any of them pleasure, in a way which was supposed to require some
+information and talent, [that] they would not, for that sole reason,
+suppose me incapable of understanding or explaining a point of the
+profession for which I had been educated. So I got a patient and very
+favourable hearing. But certainly these great exertions of friends and
+enemies have forced many a poor fellow out of the common paths of life,
+and obliged him to make a trade of what can only be gracefully executed
+as an occasional avocation. When such a man is encouraged in all his
+freaks and follies, the bit is taken out of his mouth, and, as he is
+turned out upon the common, he is very apt to deem himself exempt from
+all the rules incumbent on those who keep the king's highway. And so
+they play fantastic tricks before high heaven.
+
+The lady authors are not exempt from these vagaries, being exposed to
+the same temptations; and all I can allow Mrs. Baillie in favour of the
+fair sex is that since the time of the Aphras and Orindas of Charles
+II's time, the authoresses have been ridiculous only, while the authors
+have too often been both absurd and vicious. As to our leal friend Tom
+Campbell, I have heard stories of his morbid sensibility chiefly from
+the Minto family, with whom he lived for some time, and I think they all
+turned on little foolish points of capricious affectation, which perhaps
+had no better foundation than an ill-imagined mode of exhibiting his
+independence. But whatever I saw of him myself--and we were often
+together, and sometimes for several days--was quite composed and manly.
+Indeed, I never worried him to make him get on his hind legs and spout
+poetry when he did not like it. He deserves independence well; and if
+the dog which now awakens him to the recollection of his possessing it,
+happened formerly to disturb the short sleep that drowned his
+recollection of so great a blessing, there is good reason for enduring
+the disturbance with more patience than before.
+
+But surely, admitting all our temptations and irregularities there are
+men of genius enough living to restrain the mere possession of talent
+from the charge of disqualifying the owner for the ordinary occupation
+and duties of life. There never were better men, and especially better
+husbands, fathers, and real patriots, than Southey and Wordsworth; they
+might even be pitched upon as most exemplary characters. I myself, if I
+may rank myself in the list, am, as Hamlet says, indifferent honest, and
+at least not worse than an infidel in loving those of my own house. And
+I think that generally speaking, authors, like actors, being rather
+less commonly believed to be eccentric than was the faith fifty years
+since, do conduct themselves as amenable to the ordinary rules of
+society.
+
+This tirade was begun a long time since, but is destined to be finished
+at Abbotsford. Your bower is all planted with its evergreens, but must
+for seven years retain its original aspect of a gravel pit.
+
+(Rest lost.)
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
+
+
+     It is a strange thing, and could hardly have happened in any
+     country but England, that there is to this day no complete
+     collection or edition of the works of Coleridge--one of the
+     most poetical of our poets, one of the most important of our
+     critics, and one of the most influential, if one of the
+     least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers. Indeed
+     we never knew what good prose he could write till the
+     fragments called _Anima Poetae_ were published, two-thirds
+     of a century after his death. But that no collected edition
+     of his letters appeared till very shortly before this is
+     explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's temperament
+     was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his
+     conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage,
+     the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he
+     must have been "a very _beatable_ child." To a certain
+     extent, however, the correspondence does also justify our
+     adoption (see _Introduction_) of the charitable theory that
+     enlargement of understanding brings about extension of
+     pardon. And putting this aside, the letters sometimes give
+     us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous conversation
+     (or rather monologue) must have been like. They are not very
+     easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to
+     _divagation_ affects them. But they sometimes display that
+     humour which he undoubtedly possessed, though his best-known
+     published writings seldom admit of it: and the divagation
+     itself has its advantages. In the following Coleridge
+     appears in curiously different lights. After joking at his
+     own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it _was_,
+     as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to
+     cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often
+     made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise
+     to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a
+     favourite quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the _Morning
+     Post_ for which Coleridge was then writing. "The
+     Anthology"--an _Annual_ one edited by Southey. As for the
+     _Anti-Jacobin_ libel it was, admirable as was the wit that
+     accompanied it, utterly indefensible; for it accused
+     Coleridge of having _at this time_ "left his poor children
+     fatherless and his wife destitute" (the extraordinary thing
+     is that he actually did this later!) Of course he never
+     executed the Life of Lessing.[115] "The Wedgwoods" had given
+     him an annuity. The assault on "Mr. Go_b_win" is one of poor
+     Hartley Coleridge's most delightful feats. Had he been a
+     little older, he might have pointed out to the author of
+     _Political Justice_ that lecturing his mother for his,
+     Hartley's, fault was quite unjustifiable: and indeed that
+     objecting to it at all was improper. The right way
+     (according to that great work itself) would have been to
+     discuss with Hartley whether the advantage in physical
+     exercise and animal spirits derived by him from wielding the
+     nine-pin, outweighed the pain experienced by Go_b_win, and
+     so was justifiable on the total scheme of things. ("Moshes,"
+     as indeed is obvious, was Hartley's pet-name).
+
+
+29. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
+
+Tuesday night, 12 o'clock
+(December 24) 1799.
+
+My dear Southey,
+
+My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)
+disposed me to consider this big city as that part of the supreme One
+which the prophet Moses was allowed to see--I should be more disposed
+to pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a _Bush_, than while I am forcing
+my reason to believe that even in theatres _He_ is, yea! even in the
+Opera House. Your "Thalaba" will beyond all doubt bring you two hundred
+pounds, if you will sell it at once; but _do_ not print at a venture,
+under the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that Longman
+regretted the bargain he made with Cottle concerning the second edition
+of the "Joan of Arc," and is indisposed to similar negotiations; but
+most and very eager to have the property of your works at almost any
+price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you may hear it from
+me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle's affairs in London. The whole
+and total copyright of your "Joan," and the first volume of your poems
+(exclusive of what Longman had before given), was taken by him at three
+hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong swimmer, and have borne up
+poor Joey with all his leaden weights about him, his own and other
+people's! Nothing has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost
+somewhat--by Fox, Amos, and himself _very much_. I can sell your
+"Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am
+employed from I-rise to I-set (that is, from nine in the morning to
+twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers'
+compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays _all_ my expenses here,
+let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an
+hundred and fifty pounds for my year's expenditure; for, supposing _all
+clear_, my year's (1800) allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by
+the first of April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write
+often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay on the new
+French Constitution, Advice to Friends of Freedom, Critiques on Sir W.
+Anderson's Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted),
+Christmas Carols, etc., etc.--anything not bad in the paper, that is not
+yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the
+"Anthology," "do me the honour, sir!" However, in the course of a week I
+_do mean_ to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of
+public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of
+London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as
+strict a sense as is _possible_, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had
+planned, that "Ode to the Duchess" would have been a better thing than
+it is--it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the "Beauties of
+the Anti-jacobin," and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute,
+and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or
+expense. They say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about
+the "Fears in Solitude." If he gives them up they are yours. That dull
+ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to "sink with
+deep swoop, and to the bottom _go_," to quote an admired author; but the
+two others will do with a little trimming.
+
+My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most
+oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the "Life of
+Lessing"; till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof
+that I am _endeavouring_ to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot
+stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility
+of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the
+South of France. Peace will come soon. God love you, my dear Southey!
+_I_ would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should
+do nothing that did not absolutely _please_ you. Be idle, be very idle!
+The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but
+be as idle as you can.
+
+Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received
+our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without
+diminution on my side. 'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the
+blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's and met
+Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young
+Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine
+at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such
+a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain _lectured_
+Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. _Est modus in rebus._
+Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of
+Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary
+Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.
+
+God love you and
+
+S. T. COLERIDGE.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[115] I cannot remember whether anybody has ever made a list of the
+books that Coleridge did not write. It would be the catalogue of a most
+interesting library in Utopia.
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)
+
+
+     One of the strangest things met by the present writer in the
+     course of preparing this book was a remark of the late Mr.
+     Scoones--an old acquaintance and a man who has deserved most
+     excellently on the subject--in reference to Southey's
+     letters, that they show the author as "dry and
+     unsympathetic." "They contain too much information to be
+     good as letters." Well: there certainly is information in
+     the specimen that follows: whether it is "dry" or not
+     readers must decide. The fact is that Southey, despite
+     occasional touches of self-righteousness and of
+     over-bookishness, was full of humour, extraordinarily
+     affectionate, and extremely natural. There is moreover a
+     great deal of interest in this skit on poor Mrs. Coleridge:
+     for "lingos" of the kind, though in her case they may have
+     helped to disgust her husband with his "pensive Sara," were
+     in her time and afterwards by no means uncommon,
+     especially--physiologists must say why--with the female sex.
+     The present writer, near the middle of the nineteenth
+     century, knew a lady of family, position and property who
+     was fond of the phrase, "hail-fellow-well-met," but always
+     turned it into "Fellowship Wilmot"--a pretty close parallel
+     to "horsemangander" for "horse-godmother". Extension--with
+     levelling--of education, and such processes as those which
+     have turned "Sissiter" into "Syrencesster" and "Kirton" into
+     "Credd-itt-on", have made the phenomenon rarer: but have
+     also made such a _locus classicus_ of the habit as this all
+     the more valuable and amusing. It may be added that Lamb, in
+     one of his letters, has a sly if good-natured glance at this
+     peculiarity of the elder Sara Coleridge in reference to the
+     aptitude of the younger in her "_mother_-tongue." Southey
+     has dealt with the matter in several epistles to his friend
+     Grosvenor Bedford. The whole would have been rather long but
+     the following mosaic will, I think, do very well. Dr.
+     Warter, the editor of the supplementary collection of
+     Southey's letters from which it comes, was the husband of
+     Edith May Southey, the heroine of not a little literature,
+     sometimes[116] in connection, not merely as here with Sara
+     Coleridge the younger, but with Dora Wordsworth--the three
+     daughters of the three Lake Poets. She was, as her father
+     says, a very tall girl, while her aunt, Mrs. Coleridge, was
+     little (her husband, writing from Hamburg, speaks with
+     surprise of some German lady as "smaller than you are").
+
+
+30. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Sep. 14, 1821
+
+Dear Stumparumper,
+
+Don't rub your eyes at that word, Bedford, as if you were slopy. The
+purport of this letter, which is to be as precious as the Punic scenes
+in Plautus, is to give you some account (though but an imperfect one) of
+the language spoken in this house by ... and invented by her. I have
+carefully composed a vocabulary of it by the help of her daughter and
+mine, having my ivory tablets always ready when she is red-raggifying in
+full confabulumpatus.
+
+
+31. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Oct. 7, 1821.
+
+My dear G,
+
+I very much approve your laudable curiosity to know the precise meaning
+of that noble word _horsemangandering_. Before I tell you its
+application, you must be informed of its history and origin. Be it
+therefore known unto you that ... the whole and sole inventor of the
+never-to-be-forgotten _lingo grande_ (in which, by the bye, I purpose
+ere long to compose a second epistle), thought proper one day to call my
+daughter a great _horsemangander_, thinking, I suppose, that that
+appellation contained as much unfeminine meaning as could be put into
+any decent compound. From this substantive the verb has been formed to
+denote an operation performed by the said daughter upon the said aunt,
+of which I was an astonished spectator. The horsemangander--that is to
+say, Edith May--being tall and strong, came behind the person to be
+horsemangandered (to wit, ...), and took her round the waist, under the
+arms, then jumped with her all the way from the kitchen into the middle
+of the parlour; the motion of the horsemangandered person at every jump
+being something like that of a paviour's rammer, and all resistance
+impossible.
+
+
+32. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Oct. 8, 1821.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+P.S. The name of the newly-discovered language (of which I have more to
+say hereafter) is the _lingo grande_.
+
+
+33. TO GROSVENOR C. BEDFORD ESQ:
+
+KESWICK, Dec. 24, 1822
+
+Dear Stumparumper,
+
+So long a time has elapsed since I sent you the commencement of my
+remarks upon the peculiar language spoken by ... which I have
+denominated the LINGO-GRANDE, that I fear you may suppose that I have
+altogether neglected the subject. Yet such a subject, as you must
+perceive, requires a great deal of patient observation, as well as of
+attentive consideration; and were I to flustercumhurry over it, as if it
+were a matter which could be undercumstood in a jiffump (that is to say
+in a momper), this would be to do what I have undertaken shabroonily,
+and you might shartainly have reason to think me fuffling and
+indiscruckt. Upon my vurtz I have not dumdawdled with it, like a
+dangleampeter; which being interpreted in the same _lingo_ is an
+undecider, or an improvidentur, too idle to explore the hurtch mine
+which he has had the fortune to discover. No, I must be a stupossum
+indeed to act thus, as well as a slouwdowdekcum, or slowdonothinger; and
+these are appellations which she has never bestowed upon me; though,
+perhaps, the uncommon richness, and even exuberance of her language has
+not been more strikingly displayed in anything than in the variety of
+names which it has enabled her to shower upon my devoted person.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so-o-o,
+    Dear Miscumter Bedfordiddlededford,
+        I subcumscribe myself,
+  Your sincumcere friendiddledend and serdiddledeservant,
+    ROBCUMBERT SOUTHEY DIDDIEDOUTHEY.
+
+Student in the Lingo-Grande, Graduate in Butlerology, Professor of the
+science of Noncumsensediddledense, of sneezing and of vocal music, P.L.
+and LL.D. etc etc.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[116] See Wordsworth's _Triad_.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)
+
+
+     There are not many people about whom it is more
+     difficult--or more unnecessary--to write than it is about
+     Lamb. A few very unfortunate people do not enjoy him, and
+     probably never could be made to do so. Most of those who
+     care for literature at all revel in him: and do not in the
+     least need to be told to do so. And, as was said before,
+     there is hardly any difference between his published works
+     and his letters except that the former stand a little--a
+     very little--more "upon ceremony." As to selecting the
+     letters one remembers Mr. Matthew Arnold's very agreeable
+     confession, when he was asked to select his poems, that he
+     wanted to select them all. This being impossible, one has to
+     confess that, putting subject, scale etc. aside, any one is
+     almost as tempting as any other, and that whatever is chosen
+     reminds one, half-regretfully, of the letters that were
+     left. When a man can write (to William Wordsworth too), "The
+     very head and sum of the girlery were two young girls,"
+     there is nothing left to do but to repeat, with the slight
+     alteration of "write to" for "ask," Thackeray's ejaculation
+     to the supposed host at an unusually satisfactory dinner,
+     "Dear Sir! do _ask_ us again." And on almost every page of
+     his letters, whether in Talfourd's original issue of them or
+     in the more recent and fuller editions of his works, the
+     spirit is the same everywhere: the volume only differs. If
+     (but you never know exactly when Lamb is speaking seriously)
+     at the time he had "an aversion from letter writing," then
+     most certainly Mrs. Malaprop was justified in saying that
+     there "is nothing like beginning with a little aversion"!
+     The letter which follows is, though it may have pleased
+     others besides myself, not one of the stock examples. But
+     it seems to me to present a rather unusual combination of
+     Lamb's attractive qualities, not a little of his rare phrase
+     ("divine plain face" especially) and a remarkable expression
+     of that yearning for _solitude_ which some people seem to
+     think rather shameful, but which to others is a thing no
+     more to be accounted for than it is to be got rid of. It
+     will be observed that the letter, ostensibly to Mrs. W., is
+     really both to her and to her husband. "W. H." is of course
+     Hazlitt, and the "lectures" are his famous ones on English
+     Poets. As for Lamb's criticisms on lectures generally, they
+     would perhaps be endorsed by some who have given, as well as
+     by many who have received, this form of instruction. The
+     "gentleman at Haydon's" was the hero or victim of a story
+     good, but too long to give here. He said some excessively
+     foolish things and Lamb, after dinner, behaved to him in a
+     fashion possibly not quite undeserved but entirely
+     unsanctioned by the conventions of society.
+
+
+34. TO MRS. WORDSWORTH
+
+East India House.
+    February 18, 1818.
+
+My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,
+
+I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
+sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
+consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in
+the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready
+to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
+cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
+friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home
+is, that I am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
+double animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
+the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a
+moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
+which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.
+I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his
+unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I
+could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with
+sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other, and
+yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling thoughts all my
+own,"--faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent
+friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny
+Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the
+same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean),
+or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while
+my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of
+veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the
+chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay
+science--who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of
+criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc,--what Coleridge
+said at the lecture last night--who have the form of reading men, but,
+for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as
+well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of
+an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they
+should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its
+intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary
+warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper,
+cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which
+had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one
+of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a
+moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
+mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
+them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in
+comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon, or my
+brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
+necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating
+alone!--eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come,
+and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange;
+for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not
+wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into acidity,
+acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God bless 'em! I
+love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion
+to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and
+deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go
+before bed-time. Come never, I would say to those spoilers of my dinner;
+but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not
+happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present
+bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences,
+follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I
+am saturated with human faces (_divine_ forsooth!) and voices all the
+golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should
+covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in
+which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C. L. but always C. L.
+and Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me
+from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget
+bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.
+Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to
+bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bedroom
+window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I
+take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of
+them), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive)
+who, being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
+play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
+some cheap composer, arranged for choruses; that is, to be sung all in
+chorus. At least I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
+nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. "That fury
+being quenched"--the howl, I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
+clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
+under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
+silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
+cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used (bless
+me, I have dipt in the wrong ink!) to say every morning by way of
+variety when he awoke:
+
+    "Every knell, the Baron saith,
+     Wakes us up to a world of death"
+
+or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is,
+that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I
+have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to
+drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a
+cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office
+confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my
+own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would
+not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could
+exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a
+late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret,
+but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at being so often favoured
+with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don't
+hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead
+of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W. W. etc., seven
+times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have
+scarce room to put in Mary's kind love, and my poor name,
+
+C. LAMB.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making copious use of
+quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is
+lecturing with success. I have not heard either of him or H., but dined
+with S. T. C. at Gillman's a Sunday or two since, and he was well and in
+good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course but lectures are not
+much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If _read_, they are
+dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a
+man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure
+yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in pain lest the gift of
+utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at
+the dinner given in honour of me at the London tavern.[117] "Gentlemen,"
+said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the
+necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us
+with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised.
+Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies
+and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that
+gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled
+from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an
+office. I hate all such people--accountants' deputy-accountants. The
+dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is
+unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by
+the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet
+what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all
+our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in
+the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go.
+They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this
+week they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going
+at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us.
+Dear W. W., be thankful for liberty.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[117] Lamb would have enjoyed a recent newspaper paragraph which,
+stating that an inquest had been held on some one who, after lecturing
+somewhere was taken ill and expired, concluded thus: "Verdict: death
+from natural causes."
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)
+
+
+     It is one of the commonest of commonplaces that there are
+     certain subjects and persons who and which always cause
+     difference of opinion: and something like a full century has
+     established the fact that Byron is one of them. As far as
+     his poetry is concerned we have nothing to do with this
+     difference or these differences. They affect his letters
+     less, inasmuch as almost everybody admits them to be
+     remarkably good of their kind. But when the further
+     questions are raised, "What _is_ that kind?" and "Is it the
+     best, or even a very good kind?" the old division manifests
+     itself again. That they are extraordinarily _clever_ is
+     again more or less matter of agreement. That they make some
+     people dislike him more than they otherwise might is perhaps
+     not a fatal objection: for the people may be wrong. Besides,
+     as a matter of fact, they sometimes make other people _like_
+     him more than they would have done without these letters: so
+     the two things at least cancel each other. The chief
+     objection to them, which is hardly removable, is their too
+     frequent artificiality. Byron did not play the tricks that
+     Pope played: for, he was not, like Pope, an invalid with an
+     invalid's weaknesses and excuses. But almost more than in
+     his poems, where the "dramatic" excuse is available, (_i.e._
+     that the writer is speaking not for himself but for the
+     character) the letters provoke the question, "Is this what
+     the man thought, felt, did, or what he wished to seem to
+     feel, think, do?" In other words, "Is this _persona_ or
+     _res_?" The following shows Byron in perhaps as favourable a
+     light as any that could be chosen, and with as little of the
+     artificiality as is anywhere to be found. It is true that
+     even here Moore, his biographer and letter-giver, at first
+     included, though he afterwards cut out, some attacks on Sir
+     Samuel Romilly, whom Byron thought guilty of causing or
+     abetting dissension between Lady Byron and himself. But the
+     letter loses nothing by the omission and does not even gain
+     unfairly by it. There is nothing _false_ in the contrast of
+     comedy and sentiment concerning the cemetery. His impression
+     by the epitaphs Byron gave in more letters than one. Nor is
+     there any affectation in his remarks about his own burial,
+     about his children, or any other subject. They did "pickle
+     him and bring him home" (a quotation, not quite literal,
+     from Sheridan's _Rivals_), and his funeral procession
+     through London is the theme of a memorable passage in
+     Borrow's _Lavengro_. "Juan" is of course _Don Juan_.
+     "Allegra," his daughter by Jane (or as she re-christened
+     herself, Claire) Clairmont--step-daughter of Godwin, through
+     his second wife, and so a connection though no relation of
+     Mrs. Shelley--died at five years old. "Ada," his and Lady
+     Byron's only child, lived to marry Lord Lovelace, and
+     continued his blood to the present day. "Electra" works out
+     no further than the fact of her being the daughter of his
+     "_moral_ Clytemnestra," as he called Lady Byron, from her
+     having been almost as fatal to his reputation as the actual
+     Clytemnestra to her husband's life.
+
+
+35. TO MR. MURRAY
+
+Bologna, June 7. 1817.
+
+Tell Mr. Hobhouse that I wrote to him a few days ago from Ferrara. It
+will therefore be idle in him or you to wait for any further answers or
+returns of proofs from Venice, as I have directed that no English
+letters be sent after me. The publication can be proceeded in without,
+and I am already sick of your remarks, to which I think not the least
+attention ought to be paid.
+
+Tell Mr. Hobhouse that since I wrote to him I had availed myself of my
+Ferrara letters, and found the society much younger and better than that
+at Venice. I am very much pleased with the little the shortness of my
+stay permitted me to see of the Gonfaloniere Count Mosti, and his family
+and friends in general.
+
+I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and
+Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful
+cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls and found, besides the superb
+burial ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the
+gravedigger in _Hamlet_.
+
+He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and
+taking down one of them said "This is Brother Desiderio Birro, who died
+at forty--one of my best friends. I begged his head of his brethren
+after his decease, and they gave it me. I put it in lime and then boiled
+it. Here it is, teeth and all, in excellent preservation. He was the
+merriest, cleverest fellow I ever knew. Wherever he went he brought joy,
+and whenever anyone was melancholy, the sight of him was enough to make
+him cheerful again. He walked so actively, you might have taken him for
+a dancer--he joked--he laughed--oh! he was such a Frate as I never saw
+before, nor ever shall again!"
+
+He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the
+cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead
+people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In
+showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty,
+with a bust by Bernini. She was a princess Bartorini, dead two centuries
+ago: he said that, on opening her grave, they had found her hair
+complete, and "as yellow as gold."[118] Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara
+pleased me more than the more splendid monuments at Bologna; for
+instance:--
+
+"MARTINI LUIGI
+IMPLORA PACE."
+
+"LUCREZIA PICINI
+IMPLORA ETERNA QUIETE."
+
+Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be
+said or sought, the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was
+rest, and this they _implore_!
+
+There is all the helplessness and humble hope, and deathlike prayer,
+that can arise from the grave--'implora pace.' I hope, whoever may
+survive me, and shall see me put in the foreigners' burying-ground at
+the Lido, within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see those two words,
+and no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of "pickling, and
+bringing me home to clod or Blunderbuss Hall." I am sure my bones would
+not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that
+country. I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could
+I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my
+carcass back to your soil. I would not even feed your worms if I could
+help it.
+
+So, as Shakespeare says of Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, who
+died at Venice (see _Richard II._), that he, after fighting
+
+    "Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens,
+     And toiled with works of war, retired himself
+     To Italy, and there, at _Venice_, gave
+     His body to that _pleasant_ country's earth.
+     And his pure soul unto his captain, Christ,
+     Under whose colours he had fought so long!"
+
+Before I left Venice, I had returned to you your late, and Mr.
+Hobhouse's sheets of Juan. Don't wait for further answers from me, but
+address yours to Venice as usual. I know nothing of my own movements; I
+may return there in a few days, or not for some time. All this depends
+on circumstances. I left Mr. Hoppner very well, as well as his son and
+Mrs. Hoppner. My daughter Allegra was well too, and is growing pretty;
+her hair is growing darker, and her eyes are blue. Her temper and her
+ways, Mrs. H. says, are like mine, as well as her features: she will
+make, in that case, a manageable young lady.
+
+I have never heard anything of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenae.
+But there will come a day of reckoning, even if I should not live to see
+it. What a long letter I have scribbled.
+
+Yours &c.
+
+P.S. Here, as in Greece, they strew flowers on the tombs. I saw a
+quantity of rose-leaves, and entire roses, scattered over the graves at
+Ferrara. It has the most pleasing effect you can imagine.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[118] No one who has seen the Roman girl's hair at York, nearer two
+thousand than two hundred years old, will doubt this, though _her_
+tresses are not "yellow."
+
+
+
+
+PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)
+
+
+     It may sometimes seem as if there were only two things that
+     Shelley lacked--humour and common sense. As a matter of fact
+     he possessed both, but allowed them to be perpetually
+     stifled by other elements--not in themselves necessarily
+     bad--of his character. If either--still better both--had
+     been able to constitute themselves monarchs of his
+     Brentford, Duumvirs of the rest, his political and religious
+     extravagances would have been curbed; his less admirable
+     actions would probably--for he would not have married and
+     therefore would not have deserted poor Harriet--have been
+     obviated; and it is by no means necessary that his poetry,
+     though it could not have been much improved, should have
+     been in any degree worsened. Shakespeare, one thinks, had
+     plenty of both. Nor is this consideration irrelevant to the
+     study of his letters. There are glimmerings of the humour
+     which shines in _Peter Bell the Third_, and more of the
+     common sense which is not needed, but by no means negatived,
+     in the sublimer poems. But in the case suggested we should
+     certainly have had more of them in a department than which
+     they could have found no better home. Shelley wrote
+     everything (after his intellectual infancy) that he did
+     write, so excellently that he must have excelled here also.
+     As it is, we must take him as we find him and be thankful.
+     Since he wrote the following, English readers have perhaps
+     been satiated with writings about Art. But rather more than
+     100 years ago there had been comparatively little of it and
+     hardly anything, if anything at all, of this quality. And it
+     may not be absurd to draw attention to the differences
+     between these descriptions and those in ornate prose that
+     we have had since from Mr. Ruskin and others. Most of the
+     latter are essentially prose though often very beautiful
+     prose: Shelley's, though pure prose in form, are as it were
+     scenarios for poetry. Indeed by this time poetry had taken
+     almost entire possession of him, and he of her.
+
+
+36. TO THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
+
+BOLOGNA,
+Monday, Nov[ember] 9, 1818.
+
+My dear Peacock,
+
+I have seen a quantity of things here--churches, palaces, statues,
+fountains, and pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio
+of an architect, or a print-shop, or a commonplace-book, I will try to
+recollect something of what I have seen; for, indeed, it requires, if it
+will obey, an act of volition. First, we went to the cathedral, which
+contains nothing remarkable, except a kind of shrine, or rather a marble
+canopy, loaded with sculptures, and supported on four marble columns. We
+went then to a palace--I am sure I forget the name of it--where we saw a
+large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three
+hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember, however,
+an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which
+Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were,
+to the flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna. There was
+an exquisitely executed piece of Correggio, about four saints, one of
+whom seemed to have a pet dragon in a leash. I was told that it was the
+devil who was bound in that style--but who can make anything of four
+saints? For what can they be supposed to be about? There was one
+painting, indeed, by this master, Christ beatified, inexpressibly fine.
+It is a half figure, seated on a mass of clouds, tinged with an
+ethereal, rose-like lustre; the arms are expanded; the whole frame seems
+dilated with expression; the countenance is heavy, as it were, with the
+weight of the rapture of the spirit; the lips parted, but scarcely
+parted, with the breath of intense but regulated passion; the eyes are
+calm and benignant; the whole features harmonised in majesty and
+sweetness. The hair is parted on the forehead, and falls in heavy locks
+on each side. It is motionless, but seems as if the faintest breath
+would move it. The colouring, I suppose, must be very good, if I could
+remark and understand it. The sky is of pale aerial orange, like the
+tints of latest sunset; it does not seem painted around and beyond the
+figure, but everything seems to have absorbed, and to have been
+penetrated by its hues. I do not think we saw any other of Correggio,
+but this specimen gives me a very exalted idea of his powers.
+
+We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces--Ranuzzi,
+Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian names for any purpose,
+here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel. I saw
+many more of Guido. One, a Samson drinking water out of an ass's
+jaw-bone, in the midst of the slaughtered Philistines. Why he is
+supposed to do this, God, who gave him this jaw-bone, alone knows--but
+certain it is, that the painting is a very fine one. The figure of
+Samson stands in strong relief in the foreground, coloured, as it were,
+in the hues of human life, and full of strength and elegance. Round him
+lie the Philistines in all the attitudes of death. One prone, with the
+slight convulsion of pain just passing from his forehead, whilst on his
+lips and chin death lies as heavy as sleep. Another leaning on his arm,
+with his hand, white and motionless, hanging out beyond. In the
+distance, more dead bodies; and, still further beyond, the blue sea and
+the blue mountains, and one white and tranquil sail.
+
+There is a Murder of the Innocents, also, by Guido, finely coloured,
+with much fine expression--but the subject is very horrible, and it
+seemed deficient in strength--at least, you require the highest ideal
+energy, the most poetical and exalted conception of the subject, to
+reconcile you to such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ
+crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may
+be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and
+agonised form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of
+torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of
+passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair,
+and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate
+compassion; his hands clasped, and his fingers twisting themselves
+together, as it were, with involuntary anguish; his feet almost writhing
+up from the ground with the same sympathy; and the whole of this arrayed
+in colours of diviner nature, yet most like nature's self. Of the
+contemplation of this one would never weary.
+
+There was a "Fortune," too, of Guido; a piece of mere beauty. There was
+the figure of Fortune on a globe, eagerly proceeding onwards, and Love
+was trying to catch her back by the hair, and her face was half turned
+towards him; her long chestnut hair was floating in the stream of the
+wind, and threw its shadow over her fair forehead. Her hazel eyes were
+fixed on her pursuer, with a meaning look of playfulness, and a light
+smile was hovering on her lips. The colours which arrayed her delicate
+limbs were ethereal and warm.
+
+But, perhaps, the most interesting of all the pictures of Guido which I
+saw was a Madonna Lattante. She is leaning over her child, and the
+maternal feelings with which she is pervaded are shadowed forth on her
+soft and gentle countenance, and in her simple and affectionate
+gestures--there is what an unfeeling observer would call a dulness in
+the expression of her face; her eyes are almost closed; her lip
+depressed; there is a serious, and even a heavy relaxation, as it were,
+of all the muscles which are called into action by ordinary emotions:
+but it is only as if the spirit of love, almost insupportable from its
+intensity, were brooding over and weighing down the soul, or whatever it
+is, without which the material frame is inanimate and inexpressive.
+
+There is another painter here, called Franceschini, a Bolognese, who,
+though certainly very inferior to Guido, is yet a person of excellent
+powers. One entire church, that of Santa Catarina, is covered by his
+works. I do not know whether any of his pictures have ever been seen in
+England. His colouring is less warm than that of Guido, but nothing can
+be more clear and delicate; it is as if he could have dipped his pencil
+in the hues of some serenest and star-shining twilight. His forms have
+the same delicacy and aerial loveliness; their eyes are all bright with
+innocence and love; their lips scarce divided by some gentle and sweet
+emotion. His winged children are the loveliest ideal beings ever created
+by the human mind. These are generally, whether in the capacity of
+Cherubim or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture; and the
+underplot of their lovely and infantine play is something almost
+pathetic from the excess of its unpretending beauty. One of the best of
+his pieces is an Annunciation of the Virgin:--the Angel is beaming in
+beauty; the Virgin, soft, retiring, and simple.
+
+We saw, besides, one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia: this is in another
+and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it; and
+yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is
+of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
+executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the
+ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the
+baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
+perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
+Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
+painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut
+hair flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
+countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
+and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She
+is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased
+to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by
+their attitudes, towards her; particularly St. John, who, with a tender
+yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with
+the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music,
+broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not speak; it eclipses
+nature, yet it has all her truth and softness.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)
+
+
+     A good deal has already been said of Keats in the
+     Introduction; but a little more may be pardoned on that most
+     remarkable correspondence with his brother and sister-in-law
+     which is there mentioned, and which it is hoped may be
+     fairly sampled here. There is nothing quite like it: and one
+     can only be thankful to the Atlantic (which here at least
+     can have "disappointed" nobody worth mentioning) for causing
+     the separation that brought it about. The inspirations which
+     it shows were happily double. We do not know very much about
+     George Keats, but John's family affection was of the
+     keenest, and this was the only member of the family who was,
+     in all the circumstances, likely to sympathise thoroughly
+     with the poet in his poetry as in other things. Georgiana is
+     said to have been personally attractive and mentally gifted
+     beyond the common: and there is no doubt that this excited
+     something more than mere family devotion in such an
+     impressionable person as Keats. The combined reagency of
+     these relatives has given us what we have from no other
+     English poet--for the simple reason that no other English
+     poet has had such a chance of giving it to us. The only
+     thing to regret is that it could not continue longer: and
+     that is only a necessary operation of Fate. The particular
+     passage chosen here is one of the best known perhaps, but it
+     is also one of the most illuminating: for it gives at once
+     Keats's natural and simple interest in ordinary things, with
+     no mere trivialities: his _real_ attitude (so different from
+     that long attributed to him!) as regards the attacks of
+     critics, and his passion for beauty apart from mere
+     hedonism. The "Charmian" was at one time supposed to be
+     Miss Brawne: but this was an error. She was a Miss Jane Cox,
+     and nothing is heard of her afterwards.
+
+
+37. TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS
+
+[October 14 or 15, 1818]
+
+I came by ship from Inverness, and was nine days at Sea without being
+sick. A little qualm now and then put me in mind of you; however, as
+soon as you touch the shore, all the horrors of sickness are soon
+forgotten, as was the case with a lady on board, who could not hold her
+head up all the way. We had not been in the Thames an hour before her
+tongue began to some tune--paying off, as it was fit she should, all old
+scores. I was the only Englishman on board. There was a downright
+Scotchman, who, hearing that there had been a bad crop of potatoes in
+England, had brought some triumphant specimens from Scotland. These he
+exhibited with national pride to all the ignorant lightermen and
+watermen from the Nore to the Bridge. I fed upon beef all the way; not
+being able to eat the thick porridge which the Ladies managed to manage,
+with large, awkward, horn spoons into the bargain. Reynolds has returned
+from a six-weeks' enjoyment in Devonshire; he is well, and persuades me
+to publish my "Pot of Basil" as an answer to the attacks made on me in
+"Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Quarterly Review." There have been two
+Letters in my defence in the Chronicle and one in the Examiner, copied
+from the Exeter Paper, and written by Reynolds. I do not know who wrote
+those in the Chronicle. This is a mere matter of the moment--I think I
+shall be among the English Poets after my death. Even as a Matter of
+present interest the attempt to crush me in the "Quarterly" has only
+brought me more into notice, and it is a common expression among
+book-men, "I wonder the Quarterly should cut its own throat." It does me
+not the least harm in Society to make me appear little and ridiculous: I
+know when a man is superior to me and give him all due respect; he will
+be the last to laugh at me; and as for the rest I feel that I make an
+impression upon them which insures me personal respect while I am in
+sight, whatever they may say when my back is turned.
+
+The Misses ---- are very kind to me, but they have lately displeased me
+much, and in this way: Now I am coming the Richardson! On my return, the
+first day I called, they were in a sort of taking or bustle about a
+Cousin of theirs, who, having fallen out with her Grandpapa in a serious
+manner, was invited by Mrs. ---- to take asylum in her house. She is an
+East-Indian, and ought to be her grandfather's heir. At the time I
+called, Mrs. ---- was in conference with her upstairs, and the young
+ladies were warm in her praises downstairs, calling her genteel,
+interesting and a thousand other pretty things to which I gave no heed,
+not being partial to nine-days' wonders--Now all is completely
+changed--they hate her, and from what I hear she is not without faults
+of a real kind: but she has others, which are more apt to make women of
+inferior charms hate her. She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a
+Charmian. She has a rich Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine
+manners. When she comes into the room she makes an impression the same
+as the Beauty of a Leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious of
+herself to repulse any Man who may address her; from habit she thinks
+that nothing _particular_. I always find myself more at ease with such
+a woman: the picture before me always gives me a life and animation
+which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times
+too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble: I forget
+myself entirely, because I live in her. You will, by this time, think
+that I am in love with her, so, before I go any further, I will tell you
+I am not. She kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
+speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can feel
+none deeper than a conversation with an imperial woman, the very "yes"
+and "no" of whose life is to me a banquet. I don't cry to take the moon
+home with me in my pocket, nor do I fret to leave her behind me. I like
+her, and her like, because one has no _sensations_; what we both are is
+taken for granted. You will suppose I have by this had much talk with
+her--no such thing; there are the Misses ----on the look out. They think
+I don't admire her because I don't stare at her; they call her a flirt
+to me--what a want of knowledge! She walks across a room in such a
+manner that a man is drawn towards her with a magnetic power; this they
+call flirting! They do not know things; they do not know what a woman
+is. I believe, though, she has faults; the same as Charmian and
+Cleopatra might have had. Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly
+way; for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of
+things--the worldly, theatrical and pantomimical; and the unearthly,
+spiritual and ethereal. In the former, Buonaparte, Lord Byron and this
+Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter, John Howard,
+Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are
+the conquering feelings. As a man of the world I love the rich talk of
+a Charmian; as an eternal being I love the thought of you. I should
+like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.
+
+    "I am free from men of pleasure's cares,
+     By dint of feelings far more deep than theirs."
+
+This is "Lord Byron," and is one of the finest things he has said.
+
+
+
+
+THE CARLYLES--THOMAS (1795-1881) AND
+JANE WELSH (1801-1866)
+
+
+     A paradoxer, even of a less virulent-frivolous type than
+     that with which we have been recently afflicted, might
+     sustain, for some little time at any rate, the argument
+     against preservation of letters from the case of this
+     eminent couple. If Mrs. Carlyle had not written hers, or if
+     they had remained unknown, the whole sickening controversy
+     about the character and married life of the pair might, as
+     was said in the Introduction, never have existed. And if
+     Carlyle himself had written none, persons of any
+     intelligence would still have had a pretty adequate idea of
+     him from his _Works_. On the other hand the addition to
+     knowledge in his case is quite welcome: and in hers it
+     practically gives us what we could hardly have known
+     otherwise--one of the most remarkable of woman-natures, and
+     one of the most striking confirmations of the merciless
+     adage "Whom the gods curse, to them they grant the desires
+     of their hearts." For she wanted above all things to be the
+     wife of a man of genius--and she was. So the _pro_ and the
+     _con_ in this matter may so far be set against each other.
+     But there remains to credit a considerable amount of most
+     welcome and (notably in the instance specified in the
+     Introduction) almost consummate literature of the epistolary
+     kind. This instance itself is perhaps too tragic for our
+     little collection: indeed it might help to spread the
+     exaggerated idea of the writer's unhappiness which has been
+     too prevalent already. There is some "metal more attractive"
+     in her letters, which perhaps, taken all round, put her with
+     Madame de Sevigne and "Lady Mary" at the head of all
+     _published_ women letter-writers. And Carlyle's annotations
+     to them, when not too bilious or too penitent, show him
+     almost at his best. His own (given below) to FitzGerald (the
+     way in which epistolary literature interconnects itself has
+     been noted) appears to me one of his most characteristic
+     though least volcanic utterances. It was written while he
+     was in the depths of what his wife called "the Valley of the
+     Shadow of Frederick," (_i.e._ his vast book on that amiable
+     monarch) and had retired to _extra_-solitude in consequence.
+     "Farlingay" refers to a recent stay in Suffolk with
+     FitzGerald. As often with Carlyle, there may be more than
+     one interpretation of his inverted commas at "gentleman" as
+     regards Voltaire, to whom he certainly would not have
+     allotted the word in its best sense. The phrase about Chaos
+     and the Evil Genius is Carlyle shut up in narrow space like
+     the other genius or genie in the Arabian Nights. The "_awful
+     jangle_ of bells" speaks his horror of any invading sound.
+     The "Naseby matter" refers to a monument which he and
+     FitzGerald had planned, and which (with the precedent
+     investigation as to the battle which F. had conducted years
+     before for his _Cromwell_), occupies a good deal of
+     FitzGerald's own correspondence. Indeed, it is thanks to
+     Naseby that we possess this very letter. FitzGerald says
+     elsewhere that he kept only these Naseby letters of all
+     Carlyle's correspondence with him, destroying the rest, as
+     he did Thackeray's and Tennyson's, lest "private personal
+     history should fall into some unscrupulous hands." One
+     admires the conduct while one feels the loss. As for the
+     monument, it never came off: though it was talked about for
+     some thirty years. Mrs. Carlyle's--one of the early and,
+     despite complaints, cheerful time, the other later and,
+     despite its resignation, from "the Valley of the
+     Shadow"--require no annotation, save in respect of Carlyle's
+     own on _Deerbrook_. He might well call it "poor": it is
+     indeed one of the few novels by a writer of any distinction,
+     which one tolerably voracious novel-reader has found
+     incapable of being read. And this is curious: for she had
+     written good stories earlier.
+
+
+38. TO EDWARD FITZGERALD
+
+ADDISCOMBE FARM, CROYDON.
+15th Septr. 1855
+
+Dear Fitzgerald,
+
+I have been here ever since the day you last heard of me; leading the
+strangest life of absolute _Latrappism_; and often enough remembering
+Farlingay and you. I live perfectly alone, and without speech at
+all,--there being in fact nobody to speak to, except one austerely
+punctual housemaid, who does her functions, like an eight-day clock,
+generally without bidding. My wife comes out now and then to give the
+requisite directions; but commonly withdraws again on the morrow,
+leaving the monster to himself and his own ways. I have Books; a
+complete Edition of _Voltaire_, for one Book, in which I read for _use_,
+or for idleness oftenest,--getting into endless reflexions over it,
+mostly of a sad and not very utterable nature. I find V. a 'gentleman,'
+living in a world partly furnished with such; and that there are now
+almost no 'gentlemen' (not quite _none_): this is one great head of my
+reflexions, to which there is no visible _tail_ or finish. I have also a
+Horse (borrowed from my fat Yeoman friend, who is at sea-bathing in
+Sussex); and I go riding, at great lengths daily, over hill and dale;
+this I believe is really the main good I am doing,--if in this either
+there be much good. But it is a strange way of life to me, for the time;
+perhaps not unprofitable; To let _Chaos_ say out its say, then, and
+one's Evil Genius give one the very worst language he has, for a while.
+It is still to last for a week or more. Today, for the first time, I
+ride back to Chelsea, but mean to return hither on Monday. There is a
+great circle of yellow light all the way from Shooter's Hill to Primrose
+Hill, spread round my horizon every night, I see it while smoking my
+pipe before bed (so bright, last night, it cast a visible shadow of me
+against the white window-shutters); and this is all I have to do with
+London and its _gases_ for a fortnight or more. My wife writes to me,
+there was an awful jangle of bells last day she went home from this; a
+Quaker asked in the railway, of some porter, 'Can thou tell me what
+these bells mean?'--'Well, I suppose something is up. They say
+Sebastopol is took, and the Rushans run away.'--_A la bonne heure_; but
+won't they come back again, think you?
+
+On the whole I say, when you get your little Suffolk cottage, you must
+have in it a 'chamber in the wall' for me, _plus_ a pony that can trot,
+and a cow that gives good milk: with these outfits we shall make a
+pretty rustication now and then, not wholly _Latrappish_, but only
+_half_, on much easier terms than here; and I shall be right willing to
+come and try it, I for one party.--Meanwhile, I hope the Naseby matter
+is steadily going ahead; sale _completed_; and even the _monument_
+concern making way. Tell me a little how that and other matters are. If
+you are at home, a line is rapidly conveyed hither, steam all the way:
+after the beginning of the next week, I am at Chelsea, and (I dare so)
+there is a fire in the evenings now to welcome you there. Shew face in
+some way or other.
+
+And so adieu; for my hour of riding is at hand.
+
+Yours ever truly,
+
+T. CARLYLE.
+
+
+39. TO MRS. WALSH,
+
+CHELSEA: Sept. 5, 1836.
+
+My dear Aunt,
+
+Now that I am fairly settled at home again, and can look back over my
+late travels with the coolness of a spectator, it seems to me that I
+must have tired out all men, women and children that have had to do with
+me by the road. The proverb says 'there is much ado when cadgers ride.'
+I do not know precisely what 'cadger' means, but I imagine it to be a
+character like me, liable to head-ache, to sea-sickness, to all the
+infirmities 'that flesh is heir to,' and a few others besides; the
+friends and relations of cadgers should therefore use all soft
+persuasions to induce them to remain at home.[119]
+
+I got into that Mail the other night with as much repugnance and
+trepidation as if it had been a Phalaris' brazen bull, instead of a
+Christian vehicle, invented for purposes of mercy--not of cruelty. There
+were three besides myself when we started, but two dropped off at the
+end of the first stage, and the rest of the way I had, as usual, half of
+the coach to myself. My fellow-passenger had that highest of all
+terrestrial qualities, which for me a fellow-passenger can possess--he
+was silent. I think his name was Roscoe, and he read sundry long papers
+to himself, with the pondering air of a lawyer.
+
+We breakfasted at Lichfield, at five in the morning, on muddy coffee and
+scorched toast, which made me once more lyrically recognise in my heart
+(not without a sign of regret) the very different coffee and toast with
+which you helped me out of my headache. At two there was another stop of
+ten minutes, that might be employed in lunching or otherwise. Feeling
+myself more fevered than hungry, I determined on spending the time in
+combing my hair and washing my face and hands with vinegar. In the midst
+of this solacing operation I heard what seemed to be the Mail running
+its rapid course, and quick as lightning it flashed on me, 'There it
+goes! and my luggage is on the top of it, and my purse is in the pocket
+of it, and here am I stranded on an unknown beach, without so much as a
+sixpence in my pocket to pay for the vinegar I have already consumed!'
+Without my bonnet, my hair hanging down my back, my face half dried, and
+the towel, with which I was drying it, firm grasped in my hand, I dashed
+out--along, down, opening wrong doors, stumbling over steps, cursing the
+day I was born, still more the day on which I took a notion to travel,
+and arrived finally at the bar of the Inn, in a state of excitement
+bordering on lunacy. The barmaids looked at me 'with wonder and
+amazement.' 'Is the coach gone?' I gasped out. 'The coach? Yes!' 'Oh!
+and you have let it away without me! Oh! stop it, cannot you stop it?'
+and out I rushed into the street, with streaming hair and streaming
+towel, and almost brained myself against--the Mail! which was standing
+there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had
+heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I
+ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put
+on my bonnet, and came back 'a sadder and a wiser woman.'
+
+I did not find my husband at the 'Swan with Two Necks'; for we were in a
+quarter of an hour before the appointed time. So I had my luggage put
+on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, where I
+presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By and by, however, the omnibus
+stopped, and amid cries of 'No room, sir,' 'Can't get in,' Carlyle's
+face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the
+door, like the Peri, who, 'at the Gate of Heaven, stood disconsolate.'
+In hurrying along the Strand, pretty sure of being too late, amidst all
+the imaginable and unimaginable phenomena which the immense thoroughfare
+of a street presents, his eye (Heaven bless the mark!) had lighted on my
+trunk perched on the top of the omnibus, and had recognised it. This
+seems to me one of the most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever
+manifested. Happily, a passenger went out a little further on, and then
+he got in.
+
+My brother-in-law had gone two days before, so my arrival was most
+well-timed. I found all at home right and tight; my maid seems to have
+conducted herself quite handsomely in my absence; my best room looked
+really inviting. A bust of Shelley (a present from Leigh Hunt), and a
+fine print of Albert Durer, handsomely framed (also a present) had still
+further ornamented it during my absence. I also found (for I wish to
+tell you all my satisfaction) every grate in the house furnished with a
+supply of coloured clippings, and the holes in the stair-carpet all
+darned, so that it looks like new. They gave me tea and fried bacon, and
+staved off my headache as well as might be. They were very kind to me,
+but, on my life, everybody is kind to me, and to a degree that fills me
+with admiration. I feel so strong a wish to make you all convinced how
+very deeply I feel your kindness, and just the more I would say, the
+less able I am to say anything.
+
+God bless you all. Love to all, from the head of the house down to
+Johnny.
+
+Your affectionate,
+
+JANE W. CARLYLE.
+
+
+40. TO MRS. STIRLING, HILL STREET, EDINBURGH.
+
+5 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA: October 21, 1859.
+
+You dear nice woman! there you are! a bright cheering apparition to
+surprise one on a foggy October morning, over one's breakfast--that most
+trying institution for people who are 'nervous' and 'don't sleep!'
+
+It (the photograph) made our breakfast this morning 'pass off,' like the
+better sort of breakfasts in Deerbrook,[120] in which people seemed to
+have come into the world chiefly to eat breakfast in every possible
+variety of temper!
+
+Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the
+inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor
+suffering humanity than anything that has 'cast[121] up' in my time or
+is like to--this art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves of
+tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting
+favourably on the morality of the country? I assure you I have often
+gone into my own room, in the devil's own humour--ready to answer at
+'things in general,' and some things in particular--and, my eyes resting
+by chance on one of my photographs of long-ago places and people, a
+crowd of sad, gentle thoughts has rushed into my heart, and driven the
+devil out, as clean as ever so much holy water and priestly exorcism
+could have done! I have a photograph of Haddington church tower, and my
+father's tombstone in it--of every place I ever lived at as a
+home--photographs of old lovers! old friends, old servants, old dogs! In
+a day or two, you, dear, will be framed and hung up among the 'friends.'
+And that bright, kind, indomitable face of yours will not be the least
+efficacious face there for exorcising my devil, when I have him! Thank
+you a thousand times for keeping your word! Of course you would--that is
+just the beauty of you, that you never deceive nor disappoint.
+
+Oh my dear! my dear! how awfully tired I was with the journey home, and
+yet I had taken two days to it, sleeping--that is, attempting to
+sleep--at York. What a pity it is that Scotland is so far off! all the
+good one has gained there gets shaken off one in the terrific journey
+home again, and then the different atmosphere is so trying to one fresh
+from the pure air of Fife--so exhausting and depressing. If it hadn't
+been that I had a deal of housemaiding to execute during the week I was
+here before Mr. C. returned, I must have given occasion for newspaper
+paragraphs under the head of 'Melancholy Suicide.' But dusting books,
+making chair covers, and 'all that sort of thing,' leads one on
+insensibly to live--till the crisis gets safely passed.
+
+My dear! I haven't time nor inclination for much letter-writing--nor
+have you, I should suppose, but do let us exchange letters now and then.
+A friendship which has lived on air for so many years together is worth
+the trouble of giving it a little human sustenance.
+
+Give my kind regards to your husband--I like him--and believe me,
+
+Your ever affectionate,
+
+JANE WELSH CARLYLE.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[119] Clever as she was, she surely made a mistake here--unless she did
+it on purpose, which is quite possible. "Cadger" is of course only
+"beggar," and the proverb is the Scotch equivalent of ours about the
+"beggar on horseback," pretty frequently illustrated now-a-days.
+
+[120] The Deerbrook breakfasts refer to Miss Martineau's poor novel. (T.
+C.)
+
+[121] Turned. (T. C.)
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)
+
+
+     There are very few examples in biography where the
+     publication of letters has had a happier effect on the
+     general idea of the writer than in Macaulay's case. It is
+     not here a question of historical trustworthiness, or even
+     of literary-style, in both which respects he has come in for
+     severe strictures and sometimes for rather half-hearted
+     defence. Nor do the letters display any purely literary
+     gifts in him (except perhaps a playfulness of humour or at
+     least wit) which do not appear in the _History_ and the
+     _Essays_. But, as the exception may perhaps partly indicate,
+     they extend and improve the notion of his personality in the
+     most remarkable fashion. Even those who did not quarrel with
+     his views sometimes, before Sir George Trevelyan's book,
+     disliked and regretted what have been called his "pistolling
+     ways"--the positive, hectoring "hold-your-tongue" sort of
+     tone which dominated his productions. With the very rarest
+     exceptions, themselves sometimes of a revealing and
+     excusable frankness, this tone is, if not quite absent[122]
+     from, much seldomer present in, his letters. He jokes
+     without difficulty; talks without in the least monopolising
+     the conversation; shows himself often willing to live and
+     let live; and is on the whole as different a person as
+     possible from the Macaulay who is sure that "every
+     schoolboy" knows better than the author he is reviewing, and
+     who finds Johnson guilty of superstition and Swift of
+     apostasy. "Happy thrice and more also" are those whose
+     letters thus vindicate them. I have purposely chosen the
+     following example (written to his sister) from the most
+     _mundane_ class. "Appointment" was to the _Indian_ Council,
+     which explains the "Cotton" and "Muslin" and other things.
+     "Ellis" (Thomas Flower), a friend of Macaulay's from
+     Cambridge days and his literary executor in part.
+     "Lushington" (Stephen), a civilian lawyer of great eminence
+     as a judge in Admiralty and ecclesiastical matters, but a
+     rather violent politician. "Town"--Leeds. "Miss Berry" is
+     annotated elsewhere. "Sir Stratford Canning," later Viscount
+     Stratford de Redcliffe, George Canning's cousin, and one of
+     the most famous diplomatists of the nineteenth century,
+     especially during his long tenure of the Embassy at
+     Constantinople. _Vivian Grey_--Disraeli's first novel. "Lady
+     Holland," the most famous hostess on the Whig side in the
+     first half of the nineteenth century, but, by all accounts,
+     a person now and then quite intolerable. "Allen" (John), an
+     _Edinburgh Reviewer_, was familiarly called her "tame
+     atheist" (All the company were of the Holland House "set").
+     "Bobus"--Robert Percy Smith, Sydney's elder brother, a great
+     wit and scholar. "Cosher," an Irish word, is not always used
+     in this sense of "chat."
+
+
+41. TO HIS SISTER
+
+LONDON: November 1833.
+
+Dear Hannah,
+
+Things stand as they stood; except that the report of my appointment is
+every day spreading more widely; and that I am beset by advertising
+dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me, and
+fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my
+secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just
+received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not communicated my
+intentions till yesterday. He writes so affectionately and so
+plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few indeed
+from whom I shall part with so much pain; and he, poor fellow, says
+that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most
+thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited
+confidence.
+
+On the 11th of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by
+the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with
+importunities to attend and make a speech for him; and my father has
+joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a
+man who represents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand
+people to keep his own constituents in good humour; and the Spitalfields
+weavers and Whitechapel butchers are nothing to me. But, ever since I
+succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous
+attempt of the kind ever made,--I mean in persuading an audience of
+manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of
+the corn-laws was impossible,--I have been considered as a capital
+physician for desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that
+delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not very popular
+with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me
+would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was
+by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the
+11th, but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable
+that I should be out of town.
+
+I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's _soiree_. I do not know whether I
+told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir
+Stratford Canning advised me not to go near her. She was Walpole's
+greatest favourite. His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of
+the most gallant eulogy. When he was dying at past eighty, he asked her
+to marry him, merely that he might make her a Countess and leave her his
+fortune. You know that in _Vivian Grey_ she is called Miss Otranto. I
+always expected that my article would put her into a passion, and I was
+not mistaken; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing
+and kind invitation the other day.
+
+I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers, and once
+with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to
+Rogers's, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to
+rally, and make common cause against her. There was not a person at
+table to whom she was not rude; and none of us were inclined to submit.
+Rogers sneered; Sydney made merciless sport of her; Tom Moore looked
+excessively impertinent; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward
+rudeness; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest
+civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with
+Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous. When
+she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down
+with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the
+evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing up in defence of his
+patroness the best thing that he has seen in him. No sooner had Tom and
+I got into the street than he broke forth: "That such an old stager as
+Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment
+to anything but his dinner! Allen was bursting with envy to see us so
+free, while he was conscious of his own slavery."
+
+Her Ladyship has been the better for this discipline. She has
+overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and invitations. I have at
+last found out the cause of her ill-humour, or at least of that portion
+of it of which I was the object. She is in a rage at my article on
+Walpole, but at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very
+intimate with the Waldegraves, to whom the manuscripts belong, and for
+whose benefit the letters were published. But my review was surely not
+calculated to injure the sale of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an
+aside, that he quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss
+the subject.
+
+A note; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland: "Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray
+wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady.
+I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the
+Directors of the East India Company; now my servants; next week, I hope,
+to be my masters.
+
+Ever yours,
+
+T. B. M.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[122] Indeed it exemplifies Defoe's favourite proverb about "What is
+bred in the bone," etc.--as for instance when, while admitting
+Chesterfield's high position in some ways, he calls the _Letters_ "for
+the most part trash." It is scarcely too much to call such criticism
+itself "trashy."
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES (1803-1849)
+
+
+     Beddoes belongs to the small but remarkable company of
+     authors who, making little mark in their own time and none
+     at all for some time afterwards, before very long come into
+     something like their due, though they never can be exactly
+     popular. He was certainly very eccentric and possibly quite
+     mad: the circumstances of his suicide do more than justify
+     the hopes of charity and the convention of coroners' juries,
+     as to the latter conclusion. But he was an extremely
+     poetical poet and a letter-writer of remarkable
+     individuality and zest. Little notice seems to have been
+     taken, by any save a very few elect, of the first collected
+     publication of his work just after his death: though a
+     single piece, _The Bride's Tragedy_, not by any means his
+     best, had obtained praise in 1822--a time between the great
+     poetical outburst of the early nineteenth century and the
+     revival of its middle period. But Mr. Gosse's reissue in
+     completer form of the _Poems_ in 1890 and the _Letters_ four
+     years later, lodged him at once in the affection of all
+     competent critics. With something of the more eccentric
+     spirit of the seventeenth century in him, and something of
+     the Romantic revival as shown in Coleridge, Shelley and
+     Keats, he had much of his own, though he never got it
+     thoroughly or sustainedly organised and expressed. His
+     mingled passion and humour (especially the latter)
+     "escape"--make fitful spurts and explosions--in his
+     correspondence. Latterly this reflects his mental breakdown,
+     increasingly in the prose; though only a few years before
+     the end it contains wonderful verse such as the song, "The
+     swallow leaves her nest," which is a link between Blake and
+     Canon Dixon. But earlier, as in the following, there is
+     nothing beyond oddity. Of this there may seem to be a good
+     share, but a few notes will make it intelligible. It clearly
+     heralds, though the thing is first definitely indicated in a
+     later letter, Beddoes' marvellous tragedy _Death's
+     Jest-book_, which he wrote and re-wrote till it became like
+     the picture in Balzac's story an "Unknown [and Unknowable]
+     Masterpiece." The letter is further remarkable as combining
+     intense admiration for the _old_ masterpieces with a quite
+     "modern" insistence on "begetting" rather than
+     "reviving"--on "giving the literature of the age a spirit of
+     its own," etc. For details: "Sulky" (compare the French
+     _desobligeante_, celebrated by Sterne)--an obsolete form of
+     chaise. "Breaking Priscian's head" is familiar enough for
+     "using bad grammar," which the book-keeper very likely did;
+     but the explanation may be more remote. "Like a ghost from
+     the tomb" though not "quoted" is, of course, his beloved
+     Shelley's ("The Cloud"). "_Biped_ knock" = merely
+     "double"--the peculiar rat-tat which postmen have mostly
+     forgotten or not learnt--perhaps regarding it as a badge of
+     slavery like "tips." _The Fatal Dowry_--attributed to (Field
+     and) Massinger, and spoilt by Rowe into his nevertheless
+     popular _Fair Penitent_,--is one of the finest examples of
+     the second stage of Elizabethan drama. _Ultracrepidarian_--a
+     term derived from the Latin proverb _ne sutor supra_ (or
+     _ultra_) _crepidam_ and specially applied to the unpopular
+     critic Gifford who had been a shoemaker--meaning generally
+     "some one who _does_ go beyond his last and meddles with
+     things he does not understand." "McCready's" (Macready, the
+     famous actor and manager) friend Walker was probably Sidney
+     Walker the Shakespearian critic.
+
+
+42. TO THOMAS FORBES KELSALL
+
+26 MALL, CLIFTON.
+(Postmark, Jan. 11. 1825)
+
+Dear Kelsall--
+
+Day after day since Christmas I have intended to write or go to London,
+and day after day I have deferred both projects; and now I will give you
+the adventures and mishaps of this present sunday. Remorse, and
+startling conscience, in the form of an old, sulky, and a shying, horse,
+hurried me to the 'Regulator' coach-office on Saturday: 'Does the
+Regulator and its team conform to the Mosaic decalogue, Mr.
+Book-keeper?' He broke Priscian's head, and through the aperture,
+assured me that it did not: I was booked for the inside:--"Call at 26
+Mall for me."--"Yes, Sir, at 1/2 past five, A.M."--At five I rose like a
+ghost from the tomb, and betook me to coffee. No wheels rolled through
+the streets but the inaudible ones of that uncreated hour. It struck
+six,--a coach was called,--we hurried to the office but _the_ coach was
+gone. Here followed a long Brutus-and-Cassius discourse between a
+shilling-buttoned-waistcoatteer of a porter and myself, which ended in
+my extending mercy to the suppliant coach-owners, and agreeing to accept
+a place for Monday. All well thus far. The biped knock of the post
+alighted on the door at twelve, and two letters were placed upon my
+German dictionary,--your own, which I at first intended to reply to viva
+voce, had not the second informed me of my brother's arrival in England,
+his short leave of absence, and his intention to visit me here next
+week. This twisted my strong purpose like a thread, and disposed me to
+remain here about ten days longer. On the 21st at latest I go to
+London. Be there and I will join you, or, if not, pursue you to
+Southampton.
+
+The Fatal Dowry has been cobbled, I see, by some purblind
+ultra-crepidarian--McCready's friend, Walker, very likely; but
+nevertheless, I maintain 'tis a good play, and might have been rendered
+very effective by docking it of the whole fifth act, which is an
+excrescence,--re-creating Novall, and making Beaumelle a great deal more
+ghost-gaping and moonlightish. The cur-tailor has taken out the most
+purple piece in the whole web--the end of the fourth Act--and shouldered
+himself into toleration through the prejudices of the pit, when he
+should have built his admiration on their necks. Say what you will, I am
+convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling
+fellow, no creeper into worm-holes, no reviver even, however good. These
+reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c. are
+better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of
+ours, but they are ghosts; the worm is in their pages; and we want to
+see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest
+reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we
+had better beget than revive; attempt to give the literature of this age
+an idiosyncrasy and spirit of its own, and only raise a ghost to gaze
+on, not to live with--just now the drama is a haunted ruin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861)
+
+
+     Mrs. Browning was in the habit of using rather extravagant
+     language herself: and she has certainly been the victim of
+     language extravagant enough both in praise (the more
+     damaging of the two) and blame from others. FitzGerald's
+     unlucky exaggeration (see Introduction) in one way may be
+     set off by such opposite assertions as that some of her
+     poems are "the best of their kind in the English language."
+     But her letters need cause no such alarums and excursions.
+     If they are sometimes what is called by youth "Early
+     Victorian"--"Early Anything," and "Middle Anything" and
+     "Late Anything," are sure to be found sooner or later by all
+     wise persons to have their own place in life and history.
+     And sentimentalism has, in private prose, an infinitely less
+     provocative character than when it is displayed in published
+     verse. A distinguished Scotch philosopher of the last
+     generation laid it down that, in literature, for
+     demonstrative exhibitions of affection and sorrow "the
+     occasion should be adequate, and the actuality rare." But
+     letter-writing, though it can be eminently literary, is
+     always literature with a certain license attached to it:
+     arising from the fact that it was not--or ought not to have
+     been--intended for publication. And that naturalness of
+     which so much has been said is displayed constantly and by
+     no means disagreeably in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
+     epistles. In fact, you cannot help liking her the better for
+     them--which in one way at least is the supreme test. The
+     following, written soon after her marriage--an elopement of
+     a kind, but certainly justifiable if ever one was--is a very
+     pleasant specimen in more ways than one, as regards taste,
+     temper, and descriptive powers. It also contains no
+     criticism, which in her case was apt to be extremely
+     uncertain.
+
+
+43. TO MRS. MARTIN
+
+(PISA) November 5, (1846)
+
+It was pleasant to me, my dearest friend, to think while I was reading
+your letter yesterday, that almost by that time you had received mine,
+and could not even seem to doubt a moment longer whether I admitted your
+claim of hearing and of speaking to the uttermost. I recognised you too
+entirely as my friend. Because you had put faith in me, so much the more
+reason there was that I should justify it as far as I could, and with as
+much frankness (which was a part of my gratitude to you) as was possible
+from a woman to a woman. Always I have felt that you have believed in me
+and loved me, and, for the sake of the past and of the present, your
+affection and your esteem are more to me than I could afford to lose,
+even in these changed and happy circumstances. So I thank you once more,
+my dear kind friends, I thank you both--I never shall forget your
+goodness. I feel it, of course, the more deeply, in proportion to the
+painful disappointment in other quarters.... Am I bitter? The feeling,
+however, passes while I write it out, and my own affection for everybody
+will wait patiently to be 'forgiven' in the proper form, when everybody
+shall be at leisure properly. Assuredly, in the meanwhile, however, my
+case is not to be classed with other cases--what happened to me could
+not have happened, perhaps, with any other family in England.... I hate
+and loathe everything too which is clandestine--we _both_ do, Robert and
+I; and the manner the whole business was carried on in might have
+instructed the least acute of the bystanders. The flowers standing
+perpetually on my table for the last two years were brought there by one
+hand, as everybody knew; and really it would have argued an excess of
+benevolence in an unmarried man with quite enough resources in London,
+to pay the continued visits he paid to me without some strong motive
+indeed. Was it his fault that he did not associate with everybody in the
+house as well as with me? He desired it; but no--that was not to be. The
+endurance of the pain of the position was not the least proof of his
+attachment to me. How I thank you for believing in him--how grateful it
+makes me! He will justify to the uttermost that faith. We have been
+married two months, and every hour has bound me to him more and more; if
+the beginning was well, still better it is now--that is what he says to
+me, and I say back again day by day. Then it is an 'advantage' to have
+an inexhaustible companion who talks wisdom of all things in heaven and
+earth, and shows besides as perpetual a good humour and gaiety as if he
+were--a fool, shall I say? or a considerable quantity more, perhaps. As
+to our domestic affairs, it is not to _my_ honour and glory that the
+'bills' are made up every week and paid more regularly 'than bard
+beseems,' while dear Mrs. Jameson laughs outright at our miraculous
+prudence and economy, and declares that it is past belief and precedent
+that we should not burn the candles at both ends, and the next moment
+will have it that we remind her of the children in a poem of Heine's who
+set up housekeeping in a tub, and inquired gravely the price of coffee.
+Ah, but she has left Pisa at last--left it yesterday. It was a painful
+parting to everybody. Seven weeks spent in such close neighbourhood--a
+month of it under the same roof and in the same carriages--will fasten
+people together, and then travelling _shakes_ them together. A more
+affectionate, generous woman never lived than Mrs. Jameson[123] and it
+is pleasant to be sure that she loves us both from her heart, and not
+only _du bout des levres_. Think of her making Robert promise (as he has
+told me since) that in the case of my being unwell he would write to her
+instantly, and she would come at once if anywhere in Italy. So kind, so
+like her. She spends the winter in Rome, but an intermediate, month at
+Florence, and we are to keep tryst with her somewhere in the spring,
+perhaps at Venice. If not, she says that she will come back here, for
+that certainly she will see us. She would have stayed altogether
+perhaps, if it had not been for her book upon art which she is engaged
+to bring out next year, and the materials for which are to be _sought_.
+As to Pisa, she liked it just as we like it. Oh, it is so beautiful and
+so full of repose, yet not _desolate_: it is rather the repose of sleep
+than of death. Then after the first ten days of rain, which seemed to
+refer us fatally to Alfieri's 'piove e ripiove' came as perpetual a
+divine sunshine, such cloudless, exquisite weather that we ask whether
+it may not be June instead of November. Every day I am out walking while
+the golden oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired Robert
+and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards. We have been to your
+seashore, too, and seen your island, only he insists on it (Robert does)
+that it is not Corsica but Gorgona, and that Corsica is not in sight.
+_Beautiful_ and blue the island was, however, in any case. It might have
+been Romero's instead of either. Also we have driven up to the foot of
+the mountains, and seen them reflected down in the little pure lake of
+Ascuno, and we have seen the pine woods, and met the camels laden with
+faggots all in a line. So now ask me again if I enjoy my liberty as you
+expect. My head goes round sometimes, that is all. I never was happy
+before in my life. Ah, but, of course, the painful thoughts recur! There
+are some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their displeasure, or
+even under their injustice. Only it seems to me that with time and
+patience my poor dearest papa will be melted into opening his arms to
+us--will be melted into a clear understanding of motives and intentions;
+I cannot believe that he will forget me, as he says he will, and go on
+thinking me to be dead rather than alive and happy. So I manage to hope
+for the best, and all that remains, all my life here, _is_ best already,
+could not be better or happier. And willingly tell dear Mr. Martin I
+would take him and you for witnesses of it, and in the meanwhile he is
+not to send me tantalising messages; no, indeed, unless you really,
+really, should let yourselves be wafted our way, and could you do so
+much better at Pau? particularly if Fanny Hanford should come here. Will
+she really? The climate is described by the inhabitants as a 'pleasant
+spring throughout the winter,' and if you were to see Robert and me
+threading our path along the shady side everywhere to avoid the
+'excessive heat of the sun' in this November (?) it would appear a good
+beginning. We are not in the warm orthodox position by the Arno because
+we heard with our ears one of the best physicians of the place advise
+against it. 'Better,' he said, 'to have cool rooms to live in and warm
+walks to go out along.' The rooms we have are rather over-cool perhaps;
+we are obliged to have a little fire in the sitting-room, in the
+mornings and evenings that is; but I do not fear for the winter, there
+is too much difference to my feelings between this November and any
+English November I ever knew. We have our dinner from the Trattoria at
+two o'clock, and can dine our favourite way on thrushes and Chianti with
+a miraculous cheapness, and no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the prophet
+Elijah or the lilies of the field took as little thought for their
+dining, which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which we
+never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee, and rolls of milk,
+made of milk, I mean, and at nine our supper (call it supper, if you
+please) of roast chestnuts and grapes. So you see how primitive we are,
+and how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast. The worst of Pisa is,
+or would be to some persons, that, socially speaking, it has its
+dullnesses; it is not lively like Florence, not in that way. But we do
+not want society, we shun it rather. We like the Duomo and the Campo
+Santo instead. Then we know a little of Professor Ferucci, who gives us
+access to the University library, and we subscribe to a modern one, and
+we have plenty of writing to do of our own. If we can do anything for
+Fanny Hanford, let us know. It would be too happy, I suppose, to have to
+do it for yourselves. Think, however, I am quite well, quite well. I can
+thank God, too, for being alive and well. Make dear Mr. Martin keep
+well, and not forget himself in the Herefordshire cold--draw him into
+the sun somewhere. Now write and tell me everything of your plans and of
+you both, dearest friends. My husband bids me say that he desires to
+have my friends for his own friends, and that he is grateful to you for
+not crossing that feeling. Let him send his regards to you. And let me
+be throughout all changes,
+
+Your ever faithful and most affectionate,
+
+BA.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[123] Anna Jameson (1794-1860) was a woman of letters and an art-critic
+at one time of immense influence through her illustrated books on
+"Sacred and Legendary" (as well as some other) "Art." But, as somehow or
+other happens not infrequently, the objects of her "affection and
+generosity" did not include her husband.
+
+
+
+
+EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-1883)
+
+
+     Not much need be added to what was said in the Introduction
+     about this famous translator and almost equally, though less
+     uniquely, remarkable letter-writer. His life was entirely
+     uneventful and his friendships have been already
+     commemorated. The version of Omar Khayyam appeared in 1859;
+     was an utter "drug"--remainder copies going at a few
+     pence--for a time; but became one of the most admired books
+     of the English nineteenth century before very long. Some of
+     his _Letters_ were published at various times from 1889 to
+     1901 (those to Fanny Kemble in 1895). It is not perhaps
+     merely fanciful to suggest that the "uniqueness" above
+     glanced at does supply a sort of connection between the
+     _Letters_ and the _Works_. The faculty of at once retaining
+     the matter of a subject and transforming it in treatment has
+     perhaps never, as regards translation, been exhibited in
+     such transcendence as in the English _Rubaiyat_. But
+     something of this same faculty must belong to every good
+     letter-writer--and a good deal of it certainly is shown by
+     FitzGerald in _his_ letters. Indeed one of the processes of
+     letter-and memoir-study (the memoir as has been said is
+     practically an "open" letter) is that of comparing the
+     treatments of the same subject by different persons--say of
+     the Great Fire by Pepys and Evelyn, of the Riots of '80 by
+     Walpole and Johnson. He himself, as will be seen, calls the
+     letter given below "not very interesting." It seems to me
+     very interesting indeed: and likely to be increasingly so as
+     time goes on. Few things could be more characteristic of the
+     writer than his way of "visiting his sister" by living alone
+     in lodgings all _day_ for a month. The "_old_
+     age"--forty-five--is hardly less so. The allusions to
+     "Alfred" (Tennyson); "old" Thackeray, for whom he constantly
+     keeps the affectionate school and college use of the
+     adjective; Landor[124] (who unluckily did _not_ die at Bath
+     though he might have done so but for one of the last and
+     least creditable of his eccentricities); Beckford ("Old
+     Vathek"), and a fourth "old," Rogers (who was one of
+     FitzGerald's aversions); Oxford (as yet almost unstained by
+     any modernities spiritual or material); and Bath[125] (to
+     remain still longer a "haunt of ancient peace")--are
+     precious. The fifth "old," Spedding, who devoted chiefly to
+     Bacon talents worthy of more varied exercise, was one of the
+     innermost Tennyson set, as was "Harry" Lushington, who died
+     very soon after this letter was written. "Your Book" is F.
+     Tennyson's _Days and Hours_, a volume of poetry while
+     reading which probably many people have wondered in what
+     respect it came short of really great poetry, though they
+     felt it did so.
+
+
+44. TO FREDERIC TENNYSON
+
+BATH May 7/54.
+
+My dear Frederic,
+
+You see to what fashionable places I am reduced in my old Age. The truth
+is however I am come here by way of Visit to a sister I have scarce seen
+these six years; my visit consisting in this that I live alone in a
+lodging of my own by day, and spend two or three hours with her in the
+Evening. This has been my way of Life for three weeks, and will be so
+for some ten days more: after which I talk of flying back to more native
+counties. I was to have gone on to see Alfred in his "Island Home" from
+here: but it appears he goes to London about the same time I quit this
+place: so I must and shall defer my Visit to him. Perhaps I shall catch
+a sight of him in London; as also of old Thackeray who, Donne writes me
+word, came suddenly on him in Pall Mall the other day: while all the
+while people supposed _The Newcomes_ were being indited at Rome or
+Naples.
+
+If ever you live in England you must live here at Bath. It really is a
+splendid City in a lovely, even a noble, Country. Did you ever see it?
+One beautiful feature in the place is the quantity of Garden and Orchard
+it is all through embroidered with. Then the Streets, when you go into
+them, are as handsome and gay as London, gayer and handsomer because
+cleaner and in a clearer Atmosphere; and if you want the Country you get
+into it (and a very fine Country) on all sides and directly. Then there
+is such Choice of Houses, Cheap as well as Dear, of all sizes, with good
+Markets, Railways etc. I am not sure I shall not come here for part of
+the Winter. It is a place you would like, I am sure: though I do not say
+but you are better in Florence. Then on the top of the hill is old
+Vathek's Tower, which he used to sit and read in daily, and from which
+he could see his own Fonthill, while it stood. Old Landor quoted to me
+'Nullus in orbe locus, etc.,' apropos of Bath: he, you may know, has
+lived here for years, and I should think would die here, though not yet.
+He seems so strong that he may rival old Rogers; of whom indeed one
+Newspaper gave what is called an 'Alarming Report of Mr. Rogers' Health'
+the other day, but another contradicted it directly and indignantly,
+and declared the Venerable Poet never was better. Landor has some
+hundred and fifty Pictures; each of which he thinks the finest specimen
+of the finest Master, and has a long story about, how he got it, when,
+etc. I dare say some are very good: but also some very bad. He appeared
+to me to judge of them as he does of Books and Men; with a most
+uncompromising perversity which the Phrenologists must explain to us
+after his Death.
+
+By the bye, about your Book, which of course you wish me to say
+something about. Parker sent me down a copy 'from the Author' for which
+I hereby thank you. If you believe my word, you already know my
+Estimation of so much that is in it: you have already guessed that I
+should have made a different selection from the great Volume which is
+now in Tatters. As I differ in Taste from the world, however, quite as
+much as from you, I do not know but you have done very much better in
+choosing as you have; the few people I have seen are very much pleased
+with it, the Cowells at Oxford delighted. A Bookseller there sold all
+his Copies the first day they came down: and even in Bath a Bookseller
+(and not one of the Principal) told me a fortnight ago he had sold some
+twenty copies. I have not been in Town since it came out: and have now
+so little correspondence with literati I can't tell you about them.
+There was a very unfair Review in the _Athenaeum_; which is the only
+Literary Paper I see: but I am told there are laudatory ones in
+_Examiner_ and _Spectator_.
+
+I was five weeks at Oxford, visiting the Cowells in just the same way
+that I am visiting my Sister here. I also liked Oxford greatly: but not
+so well I think as Bath: which is so large and busy that one is drowned
+in it as much as in London. There are often concerts, etc., for those
+who like them; I only go to a shilling affair that comes off every
+Saturday at what they call the Pump Room. On these occasions there is
+sometimes some Good Music if not excellently played. Last Saturday I
+heard a fine Trio of Beethoven. Mendelssohn's things are mostly tiresome
+to me. I have brought my old Handel Book here and recreate myself now
+and then with pounding one of the old Giant's Overtures on my sister's
+Piano, as I used to do on that Spinnet at my Cottage. As to Operas, and
+Exeter Halls, I have almost done with them: they give me no pleasure, I
+scarce know why.
+
+I suppose there is no chance of your being over in England this year,
+and perhaps as little Chance of my being in Italy. All I can say is, the
+latter is not impossible, which I suppose I may equally say of the
+former. But pray write me. You can always direct to me at Donne's, 12,
+St. James' Square, or at Rev. G. Crabbe's, Bredfield, Woodbridge. Either
+way the letter will soon reach me. Write soon, Frederic, and let me hear
+how you and yours are: and don't wait, as you usually do, for some
+inundation of the Arno to set your pen agoing. Write ever so shortly and
+whatever-about-ly. I have no news to tell you of Friends. I saw old
+Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he
+dearly loved and whose deathbed at Hastings he had just been waiting
+upon. Harry Lushington wrote a martial Ode on seeing the Guards march
+over Waterloo Bridge towards the East: I did not see it, but it was much
+admired and handed about, I believe. And now my paper is out: and I am
+going through the rain (it is said to rain very much here) to my
+Sister's. So Goodbye, and write to me, as I beg you, in reply to this
+long if not very interesting letter.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[124] "Fitz's" remarks on Landor's judgment of "Pictures, Books and Men"
+are very amusing; for they have been often repeated in regard to his own
+on all these subjects. In fact the two, though FitzGerald was not so
+childish as Landor, had much in common.
+
+[125] The curious eulogy--preferring it to Oxford as being "large and
+busy" enough to "drown one as much" as London--is also very
+characteristic of FitzGerald. You can be alone in the country _and_ in a
+large town--hardly in a small one.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE (1809-1893)
+
+
+     To what has been said before of this remarkably gifted lady
+     little need be added. The two letters which follow, derived
+     from _Further Records_ (London, 1890), were written rather
+     late in her life, but are characteristic, in ways partly
+     coinciding, partly divergent, of her strong intellect[126]
+     and her powers of expression. The note to the ghost-story
+     leaves open the question whether Fanny did or did not know
+     the accepted doctrine that the master and mistress of a
+     haunted house are exempt from actual haunting. The "whiff of
+     grape-shot" (as Carlyle might have called it) on the
+     "Bakespearian" absurdity is one of the best things on the
+     subject that the present writer, in a long and wide
+     experience, has come across.
+
+
+45. TO H---- [EXTRACT]
+
+YORK FARM, BRANCHTOWN,
+PHILADELPHIA, Monday May 18th, 1874.
+
+One evening that my maid was sitting in the room from which she could
+see the whole of the staircase and upper landing, she saw the door of my
+bedroom open, and an elderly woman in a flannel dressing-gown, with a
+bonnet on her head, and a candle in her hand come out, walk the whole
+length of the passage, and return again into the bedroom, shutting the
+door after her. My maid knew that I was in the drawing-room below in my
+usual black velvet evening dress; moreover, the person she had seen bore
+no resemblance either in figure or face to me, or to any member of my
+household, which consisted of three young servant women besides herself,
+and a negro man-servant. My maid was a remarkably courageous and
+reasonable person, and, though very much startled (for she went directly
+upstairs and found no one in the rooms), she kept her counsel, and
+mentioned the circumstance to nobody, though, as she told me afterwards,
+she was so afraid lest I should have a similar visitation, that she was
+strongly tempted to ask Dr. W----'s advice as to the propriety of
+mentioning her experience to me. She refrained from doing so, however,
+and some time later, as she was sitting in the dusk in the same room,
+the man-servant came in to light the gas and made her start, observing
+which, he said, "Why, lors, Miss Ellen, you jump as if you had seen a
+ghost." In spite of her late experience, Ellen very gravely replied,
+"Nonsense, William, how can you talk such stuff! You don't believe in
+such things as ghosts, do you?" "Well," he said, "I don't know just so
+sure what to say to that, seeing it's very well known there was a ghost
+in this house." "Pshaw!" said Ellen. "Whose ghost?" "Well, poor Mrs.
+R----'s ghost, it's very well known, walks about this house, and no
+great wonder either, seeing how miserably she lived and died here." To
+Ellen's persistent expressions of contemptuous incredulity, he went on,
+"Well, Miss Ellen, all I can say is, several girls" (_i.e._
+maid-servants) "have left this house on account of it"; and there the
+conversation ended. Some days after this, Ellen coming into the
+drawing-room to speak to me, stopped abruptly at the door, and stood
+there, having suddenly recognized in a portrait immediately opposite to
+it, and which was that of the dead mistress of the house, the face of
+the person she had seen come out of my bedroom. I think this a very tidy
+ghost story; and I am bound to add, as a proper commentary on it, that I
+have never inhabited a house which affected me with a sense of such
+intolerable melancholy gloominess as this; without any assignable reason
+whatever, either in its situation or any of its conditions. My maid, to
+the present day, persists in every detail (and without the slightest
+variation) of this experience of hers, absolutely rejecting my
+explanation of it; that she had heard, without paying any particular
+attention to it, some talk among the other servants about the ghost in
+the house, which had remained unconsciously to her in her memory, and
+reproduced itself in this morbid nervous effect of her imagination.
+
+
+46. To H---- [EXTRACT]
+
+YORK FARM, Sunday, December 6th, 1874.
+
+My dearest H----,
+
+It is not possible for me to feel the slightest interest in the sort of
+literary feat which I consider writing upon "who wrote Shakespeare?" to
+be. I was very intimate with Harness, Milman, Dyce, Collier--all
+Shakespearian editors, commentators, and scholars--and this absurd
+theory about Bacon, which was first broached a good many years ago,
+never obtained credit for a moment with them; nor did they ever
+entertain for an instant a doubt that the plays attributed to William
+Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon were really written by him. Now I am
+intimately acquainted and in frequent communication with William Donne,
+Edward FitzGerald, and James Spedding, all thorough Shakespeare
+scholars, and the latter a man who has just published a work upon Bacon,
+which has been really the labour of his life; none of these men,
+competent judges of the matter, ever mentions the question of "Who wrote
+Shakespeare?" except as a ludicrous thing to be laughed at, and I think
+they may be trusted to decide whether it is or is not so.
+
+I have a slight feeling of disgust at the attack made thus on the
+personality of my greatest mental benefactor; and consider the whole
+thing a misapplication, not to say waste, of time and ingenuity that
+might be better employed. As I regard the memory of Shakespeare with
+love, veneration, and gratitude, and am proud and happy to be his
+countrywoman, considering it among the privileges of my English birth, I
+resent the endeavour to prove that he deserved none of these feelings,
+but was a mere literary impostor. I wonder the question had any interest
+for you, for I should not have supposed you imagined Shakespeare had not
+written his own plays, Irish though you be. Do you remember the
+servant's joke in the farce of "High Life Below Stairs" where the cook
+asks, "Who wrote Shakespeare?" and one of the others answers, with, at
+any rate, partial plausibility, "Oh! why, Colley Cibber, to be sure!"
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[126] Sometimes one thinks her the wisest woman who ever lived. "Nothing
+seems stranger than the delusions of other people _when they have ceased
+to be our own_" suggests La Rochefoucauld and comes near to Solomon; but
+whosoever may have anticipated or prompted her, he is not at the moment
+within my memory. But she is often not wise at all: and even her good
+wits are not always left unaffected by her bad temper. It is really
+amusing to read Mrs. Carlyle's rather mischievous account of Mrs. Butler
+(F. K.'s married name) calling and carrying a whip "to keep her hand
+in": and _then_ to come on F. K.'s waspish resentment at these words,
+when they were published.
+
+
+
+
+WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
+(1811-1863)
+
+
+     So much has been said of Thackeray's letter-writing powers
+     in the Introduction that not much need be added here on the
+     general side. But a few words may be allowed on what we may
+     call the _conditioning_ circumstances which affected these
+     powers, and made the result so peculiar. Except in Swift's
+     case--a thing piquant in itself considering the injustice of
+     the later writer to the earlier--hardly any body of letters
+     exhibits these conditions so obviously and in so varied a
+     fashion. In both there was the utmost intellectual satire
+     combined with the utmost tenderness of feeling. Thackeray of
+     course, partly from nature and partly from the influence of
+     time, did not mask his tenderness and double-edge his
+     severity with roughness and coarseness. But the combination
+     was intrinsically not very different. There has also to be
+     taken into account in Thackeray's case domestic
+     sorrow--coming quickly and life-long after it began; means
+     long restricted (partly by his own folly but not so more
+     tolerable); recognition of genius almost as long deferred;
+     and yet other "maladies of the soul." The result was a
+     constant ferment, of which the letters are in a way the
+     relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently
+     light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when a man
+     habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes
+     lighter--till there is nothing of it left.
+
+     He is, however, not easy to "sample," there being, as has
+     been said, no authorised collection to draw upon and other
+     difficulties in the way. What follows may serve for fault
+     of a better: and the _Spectator_ letter-pastiche referred to
+     above under Walpole, will complete it perhaps more
+     appropriately than may at first appear. For while the latter
+     is quite Addisonian, not merely in dress but in body, its
+     soul is blended of two natures--the model's and the
+     artist's--in the rather uncanny fashion which makes _Esmond_
+     as a whole so marvellous, except to those stalwarts who hold
+     that, as nobody before the twentieth century knew anything
+     about anything, Thackeray could not know about the
+     eighteenth.
+
+
+47. TO MISS LUCY BAXTER
+
+WASHINGTON, Saturday
+Feb. 19. 1853.
+
+My dear little kind Lucy:
+
+I began to write you a letter in the railroad yesterday, but it bumped
+with more than ordinary violence, and I was forced to give up the
+endeavour. I did not know how ill Lucy was at that time, only
+remembered that I owed her a letter for that pretty one you wrote me
+at Philadelphia, when Sarah was sick and you acted as her Secretary.
+Is there going to be always Somebody sick at the brown house? If I
+were to come there now, I wonder should I be allowed to come and see
+you in your night-cap--I wonder even do you wear a night-cap? I should
+step up, take your little hand, which I daresay is lying outside the
+coverlet, give it a little shake; and then sit down and talk all sorts
+of stuff and nonsense to you for half an hour; but very kind and
+gentle, not so as to make you laugh too much or your little back ache
+any more. Did I not tell you to leave off that beecely jimnayshum? I
+am always giving fine advice to girls in brown houses, and they
+always keep on never minding. It is not difficult to write lying in
+bed--this is written not in bed, but on a sofa. If you write the
+upright hand it's quite easy; slanting-dicular is not so pleasant,
+though. I have just come back from Baltimore and find your mother's
+and sister's melancholy letters. I thought to myself, perhaps I might
+see them on this very sofa and pictured to myself their 2 kind faces.
+Mr. Crampton was going to ask them to dinner, I had made arrangements
+to get Sarah nice partners at the ball--Why did dear little Lucy
+tumble down at the Gymnasium? Many a pretty plan in life tumbles down
+so, Miss Lucy, and falls on its back. But the good of being ill is to
+find how kind one's friends are; of being at a pinch (I do not know
+whether I may use the expression--whether "pinch" is an indelicate
+word in this country; it is used by our old writers to signify
+poverty, narrow circumstances, res angusta)--the good of being poor, I
+say, is to find friends to help you, I have been both ill and poor,
+and found, thank God, such consolation in those evils; and I daresay
+at this moment, now you are laid up, you are the person of the most
+importance in the whole house--Sarah is sliding about the room with
+cordials in her hands and eyes; Libby is sitting quite disconsolate by
+the bed (poor Libby! when one little bird fell off the perch, I wonder
+the other did not go up and fall off, too!) the expression of sympathy
+in Ben's eyes is perfectly heart-rending; even George is quiet; and
+your Father, Mother and Uncle (all 3 so notorious for their violence
+of temper and language) have actually forgotten to scold. "Ach, du
+lieber Himmel," says Herr Strumpf--isn't his name Herr Strumpf?--the
+German master, "die schoene Fraeulein ist krank!" and bursts into tears
+on the Pianofortyfier's shoulder when they hear the news (through his
+sobs) from black John. We have an Ebony femme de chambre here; when I
+came from Baltimore just now I found her in the following costume and
+attitude standing for her picture to Mr. Crowe. She makes the beds
+with that pipe in her mouf and leaves it about in the rooms. Wouldn't
+she have been a nice lady's-maid for your mother and Miss Bally
+Saxter?
+
+But even if Miss Lucy had not had her fall, I daresay there would have
+been no party. Here is a great snow-storm falling, though yesterday
+was as bland and bright as May (English May, I mean) and how could we
+have lionized Baltimore, and gone to Mount Vernon, and taken our
+diversion in the snow? There would have been nothing for it but to
+stay in this little closet of a room, where there is scarce room for 6
+people, and where it is not near so comfortable as the brown house.
+Dear old b.h., shall I see it again soon? I shall not go farther than
+Charleston, and Savannah probably, and then I hope I shall get another
+look at you all again before I commence farther wanderings--O, stop! I
+didn't tell you why I was going to write you--well, I went on Thursday
+to dine with Governor and Mrs. Fish, a dinner in honor of me--and
+before I went I arrayed myself in a certain white garment of which the
+collar-button-holes had been altered, and I thought of the kind,
+friendly little hand that had done that deed for me; and when the
+Fisheses told me how they lived in the Second Avenue (I had forgotten
+all about 'em)--their house and the house opposite came back to my
+mind, and I liked them 50 times better for living near some friends of
+mine. She is a nice woman, Madam Fish, besides; and didn't I abuse you
+all to her? Good bye, dear little Lucy--I wish the paper wasn't full.
+But I have been sitting half an hour by the poor young lady's sofa,
+and talking stuff and nonsense, haven't I? And now I get up, and shake
+your hand with a God bless you! and walk down stairs, and please to
+give everybody my kindest regards, and remember that I am truly your
+friend.
+
+W. M. T.
+
+
+48.
+
+THE "TRUMPET" COFFEE-HOUSE,
+WHITEHALL.
+
+'Mr Spectator--
+
+'I am a gentleman but little acquainted with the town, though I have had
+a university education, and passed some years serving my country abroad,
+where my name is better known than in the coffee-houses and St. James's.
+
+'Two years since my uncle died, leaving me a pretty estate in the county
+of Kent; and being at Tunbridge Wells last summer, after my mourning was
+over, and on the look-out, if truth must be told, for some young lady
+who would share with me the solitude of my great Kentish house, and be
+kind to my tenantry (for whom a woman can do a great deal more good than
+the best-intentioned man can), I was greatly fascinated by a young lady
+of London, who was the toast of all the company at the Wells. Everyone
+knows Saccharissa's beauty; and I think, Mr. Spectator, no one better
+than herself.
+
+'My table-book informs me that I danced no less than seven-and-twenty
+sets with her at the assembly. I treated her to the fiddles twice. I was
+admitted on several days to her lodging, and received by her with a
+great deal of distinction, and, for a time, was entirely her slave. It
+was only when I found, from common talk of the company at the Wells, and
+from narrowly watching one, who I once thought of asking the most
+sacred question a man can put to a woman, that I became aware how unfit
+she was to be a country gentleman's wife; and that this fair creature
+was but a heartless worldly jilt, playing with affections that she never
+meant to return, and, indeed, incapable of returning them. 'Tis
+admiration such women want, not love that touches them; and I can
+conceive, in her old age, no more wretched creature than this lady will
+be, when her beauty hath deserted her, when her admirers have left her,
+and she hath neither friendship nor religion to console her.
+
+'Business calling me to London, I went to St. James's Church last
+Sunday, and there opposite me sat my beauty of the Wells. Her behaviour
+during the whole service was so pert, languishing and absurd; she
+flirted her fan, and ogled and eyed me in a manner so indecent, that I
+was obliged to shut my eyes, so as actually not to see her, and whenever
+I opened them beheld hers (and very bright they are) still staring at
+me. I fell in with her afterwards at Court, and at the playhouse; and
+here nothing would satisfy her but she must elbow through the crowd and
+speak to me, and invite me to the assembly, which she holds at her
+house, nor very far from Ch--r--ng Cr--ss.
+
+'Having made her a promise to attend, of course I kept my promise; and
+found the young widow in the midst of a half-dozen of card-tables, and a
+crowd of wits and admirers. I made the best bow I could, and advanced
+towards her; and saw by a peculiar puzzled look in her face, though she
+tried to hide her perplexity, that she had forgotten even my name.
+
+'Her talk, artful as it was, convinced me that I had guessed aright. She
+turned the conversation most ridiculously upon the spelling of names and
+words; and I replied with as ridiculous, fulsome compliments as I could
+pay her; indeed, one in which I compared her to an angel visiting the
+sick-wells, went a little too far; nor should I have employed it, but
+that the allusion came from the Second Lesson last Sunday, which we both
+had heard, and I was pressed to answer her.
+
+'Then she came to the question, which I knew was awaiting me, and asked
+how I _spelt_ my name? "Madam," says I, turning on my heel, "I spell it
+with the y." And so I left her, wondering at the light-heartedness of
+the town-people, who forget and make friends so easily, and resolved to
+look elsewhere for a partner for your constant reader.
+
+'CYMON WYLDOATS.
+
+'You know my real name, Mr. Spectator, in which there is no such a
+letter as _hupsilon_. But if the lady, whom I have called Saccharissa,
+wonders that I appear no more at the tea-tables, she is hereby
+respectfully informed the reason y.'
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
+
+
+     There are few better examples by converse of the saying
+     (familiar in various forms and sometimes specially applied
+     to writing and answering letters) that it is only idle
+     people who have no time to do anything, than Dickens. He was
+     by no means long-lived: and for the last
+     three-fifths--practically the whole busy time--of his life,
+     he was one of the busiest of men. He wrote many universally
+     known books, and not a few, in some cases not so well known,
+     articles. He travelled a great deal; edited periodicals for
+     many years, taking that duty by no means in the spirit of
+     Olympian aloofness which some popular opinion connects with
+     editorship; only sometimes shirked society; and had all
+     sorts of miscellaneous occupations and avocations. His very
+     fancy for long walks might seem one of the least compatible
+     with letter-writing; yet a very large bulk of his letters
+     (by no means mainly composed of editorial ones) has been
+     published, and there are no doubt many unpublished. There
+     have been different opinions as to their comparative rank as
+     letters, but there can be no difference as to the curious
+     full-bloodedness and plenitude of life which, in this as in
+     all other divisions of his writing, characterises Dickens's
+     expression of his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps, as might
+     be generally though not universally expected, the comic ones
+     are the more delightful: at any rate they seem best worth
+     giving here. The first--to a schoolboy who had written to
+     him about _Nicholas Nickleby_--is quite charming; the
+     second, to the famous actor-manager who after being a
+     Londoner by birth and residence for half a century had just
+     retired, is almost Charles Lamb-like; and the third
+     deserved to have been put in the original mouth of Mrs.
+     Gamp![127]
+
+
+49. TO MASTER HASTINGS HUGHES
+
+DOUGHTY STREET, LONDON.
+Dec. 12th. 1838.
+
+Respected Sir,
+
+I have given Squeers one cut on the neck and two on the head, at which
+he appeared much surprised and began to cry, which, being a cowardly
+thing, is just what I should have expected from him--wouldn't you?
+
+I have carefully done what you told me in your letter about the lamb and
+the two "sheeps" for the little boys. They have also had some good ale
+and porter, and some wine. I am sorry you didn't say _what_ wine you
+would like them to have. I gave them some sherry, which they liked very
+much, except one boy, who was a little sick and choked a good deal. He
+was rather greedy, and that's the truth, and I believe it went the wrong
+way, which I say served him right, and I hope you will say so too.
+
+Nicholas had his roast lamb, as you said he was to, but he could not eat
+it all, and says if you do not mind his doing so he should like to have
+the rest hashed to-morrow with some greens, which he is very fond of,
+and so am I. He said he did not like to have his porter hot, for he
+thought it spoilt the flavour, so I let him have it cold. You should
+have seen him drink it. I thought he never would have left off. I also
+gave him three pounds of money, all in sixpences, to make it seem more,
+and he said directly that he should give more than half to his mamma and
+sister, and divide the rest with poor Smike. And I say he is a good
+fellow for saying so; and if anybody says he isn't I am ready to fight
+him whenever they like--there!
+
+Fanny Squeers shall be attended to, depend upon it. Your drawing of her
+is very like, except that I don't think the hair is quite curly enough.
+The nose is particularly like hers, and so are the legs. She is a nasty
+disagreeable thing, and I know it will make her very cross when she sees
+it; and what I say is that I hope it may. You will say the same I
+know--at least I think you will.
+
+I meant to have written you a long letter, but I cannot write very fast
+when I like the person I am writing to, because that makes me think
+about them, and I like you, and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight
+o'clock at night, and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when
+it is my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not say
+anything more besides this--and that is my love to you and Neptune; and
+if you will drink my health every Christmas Day I will drink
+yours--come.
+
+I am,
+
+Respected Sir,
+
+Your affectionate Friend.
+
+P.S. I don't write my name very plain,[128] but you know what it is you
+know, so never mind.
+
+
+50. TO MR. W. C. MACREADY
+
+Saturday, May 24th, 1851.
+
+My dear Macready,
+
+We are getting in a good heap of money for the Guild. The comedy has
+been very much improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene
+to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in the play. And
+there _is_ a farce to be produced on Tuesday next, wherein a
+distinguished amateur will sustain a variety of assumption-parts, and in
+particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am
+pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from
+the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of
+darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague
+smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on
+Wednesday or Thursday.
+
+Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you
+think of us among the London fleas! But they tell me you are coming in
+for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town to
+attend to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in
+the streets. They will misdirect you for what the vulgar call "a lark,"
+meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into some
+respectable shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by his being
+dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his
+hat being made of sticking-plaster. You may perhaps see in some odd
+place an intelligent-looking man, with a curious little wooden table
+before him and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but don't
+do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where
+the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These,
+too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good
+acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy should be), I
+would recommend you to see ---- at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
+Anybody will show it to you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it
+by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are
+eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile,
+recollect. Porter is twopence per pint; what is called stout is
+fourpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the
+price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend
+you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street, Piccadilly,
+Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these will please you after a
+time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can
+serve you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your
+happy family, so remote from this Babel.
+
+Believe me, my dear Friend,
+
+Ever affectionately yours.
+
+[CHARLES DICKENS]
+
+P.S. I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you
+will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of
+_King Charles the First_.[129]
+
+
+51. TO MR. EDMUND YATES
+
+TAVISTOCK HOUSE,
+Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. 1858.
+
+My dear Yates,
+
+Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text _is not_ "Which
+his 'owls was organs." When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to
+spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's
+exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the
+Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he never took his hands away from
+his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby." On
+encountering that spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution)
+"took with fits." For this distressing complaint he was medically
+treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid him on his back upon the
+airy stones"--please to observe what follows--"and she was told, to ease
+her mind, his 'owls was organs."
+
+That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first
+sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counterpane,
+and not yet "put comfortable," hears a noise apparently proceeding from
+the backyard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner: "What 'owls
+are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor,
+looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs.
+Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable
+presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?--no, no, no! What are we
+thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am,
+organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."
+
+Yours faithfully, [C. D.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[127] One of the pleasantest, _to me_, of Dickens's letters is that in
+which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor
+echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see _inf._ under Stevenson).
+But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.
+
+[128] Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by
+no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.
+
+[129] "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's _Not so Bad as we Seem_, acted by
+Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years
+ago, and about to be reproduced _in loco_ as these proofs are being
+revised.
+
+
+
+
+CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)
+
+
+     There are some people who, while thinking that the author of
+     _Westward Ho!_ has not, at least recently, been given his
+     due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations
+     of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings
+     Kingsley was inaccurate,--almost (as his friend and
+     brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally
+     inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his
+     way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he
+     constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as
+     philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat
+     by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his
+     contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one
+     time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more
+     educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least
+     unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.
+
+     But none of his foibles--not even corn-treading--is a fatal
+     defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good
+     chance here, and his _Letters and Memoirs_ have been
+     deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot
+     show in full the really exceptional versatility which
+     enabled the same man to write _Yeast_ and _Westward Ho!_,
+     _Andromeda_ and _The Water Babies_, the best of the Essays
+     and the best of the Sermons, _Alton Locke_ and _At Last_.
+     But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them
+     the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed
+     in one respect--as a writer--Kingsley is perhaps better in
+     his letters than in his _Essays_, where he too often affects
+     a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.
+     The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied
+     character--as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman,
+     and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of
+     praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him--"the
+     most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to
+     praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all
+     thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most
+     incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support
+     ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that
+     Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men
+     of letters I know nothing so rare as this."
+
+     It is true that the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ was
+     an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other
+     things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous
+     to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman
+     were almost fresh, he writes that he has read _The Dream of
+     Gerontius_ "with admiration and awe." [Greek: thymos], in
+     this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on
+     the other side we get, through him of _As You Like It_, an
+     explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a
+     cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once
+     saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow,
+     did it sulkily.
+
+
+52. TO TOM HUGHES, ESQ.
+
+Jan. 12. 1857.
+
+I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have
+puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that
+good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from
+every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his
+cock-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call
+it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest
+book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some
+very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should
+have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment
+frankly. Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a
+book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?
+So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the
+times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they
+are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's
+right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of
+themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company,
+I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint.
+Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I have
+good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class below. They are
+effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George
+Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than
+in fancying that by keeping down manly [Greek: thymos], which Plato
+saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They
+were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and
+'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after
+that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the
+poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier
+and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy.
+Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow
+his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other
+day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of ----, who
+cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when
+he saw the melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and would
+try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried
+it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even
+his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at
+Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run
+I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as
+good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over
+Hazeley Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and a
+streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time
+fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight,
+and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank
+broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd
+time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if you can get a
+horse through that clay vale, why then you can get him 'mostwards';
+leastwise so I find, for a black region it is, and if you ain't in the
+same field with the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same
+parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all supernumerary
+vegetations. Actually I was pounded in a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the
+amount of green stuff in these parts. Come and see me, and take the old
+mare out, and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)
+
+
+     The peculiar wilfulness--the unkind called it
+     wrong-headedness--which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's
+     genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire
+     indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of
+     displaying itself in all his work, public as well as
+     private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself
+     nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he
+     often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he
+     chosen, might as well have taken another--while he might
+     have chosen this in some which do not actually _call_
+     themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference,
+     except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the
+     classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume
+     of _Modern Painters_ to _Verona_ in time, or from _The Seven
+     Lamps of Architecture_ to _Unto This Last_ in subject. If
+     anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he
+     could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But
+     this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which
+     accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for
+     letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets
+     the benefit of both very often--of a curious study of high
+     character and great powers uncontrolled by logical
+     self-criticism almost always. The following--part of a still
+     longer letter which he addressed to the _Daily Telegraph_,
+     Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question--was of
+     course written for publication, but so, practically, was
+     everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too
+     that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand
+     and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous
+     crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally
+     to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but
+     much of his nobler idealism, while it is a capital example
+     of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam"
+     are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom,
+     tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought
+     a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity
+     enough"--the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper
+     had printed, _hoc_ instead of _hac_. "A book of Scripture,"
+     Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a
+     baby-farmer of the day.
+
+
+53. From "THE DAILY TELEGRAPH"
+
+September 18, 1865.
+
+DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY.
+
+To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."
+
+Sir,
+
+I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with
+much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when
+you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own
+experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I
+have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse,
+understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me
+gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your
+admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more
+willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published
+there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint
+worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful
+or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no
+part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families.
+The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better
+class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio,
+or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will
+hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from
+Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but
+his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to
+Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway
+went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use
+writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And,
+indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The
+cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is
+the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but
+vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no
+sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague
+spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth,
+that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a
+putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this
+galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that
+little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you
+say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no
+seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is
+his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him.
+That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.
+
+The relation of master and servant involves every other--touches every
+condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you
+put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not
+primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you
+have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good.
+You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic,
+have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have
+accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of
+being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by
+a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the
+letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the
+inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the
+general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of
+sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise
+treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody
+shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book
+of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects
+Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not
+one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to
+Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary
+position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their
+school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them:
+for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been
+written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his
+domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education
+would sometimes start to be reminded that his "_noctes coenaeque Deum!_"
+meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow
+me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your
+correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader
+in the _Art-Journal_ for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a
+little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted
+in the last paper of the _Idler_?
+
+     "I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched
+     in poverty; and beloved by the gods."
+
+     "Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body,
+     has now found deliverance for that also."
+
+How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last
+legend, and write--
+
+     "This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has
+     now found captivity for that also."
+
+I will not pass without notice--for it bears also on wide
+interests--your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from
+the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the
+economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science
+which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply,
+but determines what _ought_ to be demanded and what _can_ be supplied. A
+child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to
+the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your
+purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of
+the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into
+its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from
+its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign
+beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be
+all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political
+economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to
+be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final
+demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by
+the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this
+day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep
+his pigs out of sight of the lake.
+
+Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of
+servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want
+Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for
+money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own
+scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another
+woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of
+servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself--for
+the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only
+shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be
+knights among us, who will need squires--captains among us, needing
+crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate?
+Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill?
+Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to
+serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little
+thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It
+_might_ come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but
+if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they
+_are_ so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more
+useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and
+organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will
+be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let
+the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to
+stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the
+pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost
+in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the
+Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its
+shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if
+reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again,
+instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON
+(1850-1894)
+
+
+     The author of _Treasure Island_ (invariably known to his
+     friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved in
+     the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable
+     cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew
+     Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that
+     of our Matthew on Shelley. For a short time some of these
+     friends--not perhaps the wisest of them--were inclined to
+     regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer
+     of criticisms and miscellaneous articles--a sort of new
+     Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the _New Arabian Nights_ than
+     they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen for
+     a long time--such as, in respect of anything imitable, had
+     never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in with
+     these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure Romance,
+     and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar. On the other
+     hand his letters are almost as good as his fiction, and not
+     in the least open to the charges of a certain
+     non-naturalness of style--even of thought--which could,
+     justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it
+     is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their
+     popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other
+     division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their
+     "touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the
+     blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference
+     to its context) need not be discussed.
+
+     As, by the kindness of Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, I am enabled to
+     give here an unpublished letter of Stevenson's to myself, it
+     may require some explanation, not only of the commentatory
+     and commendatory kind but of fact. Stevenson, coming to dine
+     with me, had brought with him, and showed with much pride, a
+     new umbrella (a seven-and-sixpenny one) which, to my
+     surprise, he had bought. But when he went away that night he
+     forgot it; and when I met him next day at the Savile and
+     suggested that I should send it to him, there or somewhere,
+     he said he was going abroad almost immediately and begged me
+     to keep it for him. By this or that accident, but chiefly
+     owing to his constant expatriations, no opportunity of
+     restitution ever occurred: though I used to remind him of it
+     as a standing joke, and treasured it religiously, stored and
+     unused. This letter is partly in answer to a last reminder
+     in which I said that I was going to present it to the
+     nation, that it might be kept with King Koffee Kalcalli's,
+     but as a memory of a "victor in romance" not of a vanquished
+     enemy.
+
+     I of course told Mr. Kipling of the contents which concerned
+     him: and he, equally of course, demanded delivery of the
+     goods at once. But, half in joke, I demurred, saying that I
+     was a bailee, and the gift was not formal enough, being
+     undated and only a "suggestion"; he should have it without
+     fail at my death, or Stevenson's.[130]
+
+     When alas! this latter came, I prepared to act up to my
+     promise; but, alas! again, the umbrella had vanished! Some
+     prated of mislaying in house-removal, of illicit use by
+     servants, etc.; but for my part I had and have no doubt that
+     the thing had been enskyed and constellated--like Ariadne's
+     Crown, Berenice's Locks, Cassiopeia's Chair, and a whole
+     galaxy of other now celestial objects--to afford a special
+     place to my dead friend then, and to my live one when (may
+     the time still be far distant) he is ready for it.
+
+     As for the more serious subject of the letter, I must refer
+     curious readers to an essay of mine on Lockhart, originally
+     published in 1884 and reprinted in _Essays in English
+     Literature_ some years later. To this reprint I subjoined,
+     _before_ I got this letter from R. L. S., a reasoned defence
+     of Lockhart from the charge of cowardice and "caddishness":
+     but it is evident that Stevenson had not yet seen it. When
+     he did see it, he wrote me another letter chiefly about my
+     book itself, and so of no interest to the public, but
+     touching again on this Lockhart question. He avowed himself
+     still dissatisfied: but said he was sorry for his original
+     remark which was "ungracious and unhandsome" if not untrue,
+     adding, "for to whom do I owe more pleasure than to
+     Lockhart?"
+
+
+54.
+
+My dear Saintsbury,
+
+Thanks for yours. Why did I call Lockhart a cad? That calls for an
+answer, and I give it. "Scorpion"[131] literature seems at the best no
+very fit employment for a man of genius, which Lockhart was--and none at
+all for a gentleman. But if a man goes in for such a trade, he must be
+ready for the consequences; and I do not conceive a gentleman as a
+coward; the white feather is not his crest, it _almost_ excludes--and I
+put the "almost" with reluctance. Well, now about the duel? Even
+Bel-Ami[132] turned up on the _terrain_. But Lockhart? _Et responsum est
+ab omnibus, Non est inventus._[133] I have often wondered how Scott took
+that episode.[134] I do not know how this view will strike you;[135] it
+seems to me the "good old honest" fashion of our fathers, though I own
+it does not agree with the New Morality. "Cad" may be perhaps an
+expression too vivacious and not well chosen; it is, at least upon my
+view, substantially just.
+
+Now if you mean to comb my wig, comb it from the right parting--I know
+you will comb it well.
+
+An infinitely small jest occurs to me in connection with the historic
+umbrella: and perhaps its infinite smallness attracts me. Would you mind
+handing it to Rudyard Kipling with the enclosed note?[136] It seems to
+me fitly to consecrate and commemorate this most absurd episode.
+
+Yours very sincerely,
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+[_Enclosure_]
+
+                        This Umbrella
+                purchased in the year 1878 by
+                  Robert Louis Stevenson
+(and faithfully stabled for more than twelve years in the
+                halls of George Saintsbury)
+  is now handed on at the suggestion of the first and
+            by the loyal hands of the second,
+                            to
+                    Rudyard Kipling.
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[130] Of this _moratorium_ I believe I duly advised R. L. S. and I don't
+think he objected. There was, if I remember rightly, a further reason
+for it--that I was living in two places at the time and the subject was
+not immediately at hand.
+
+[131] Lockhart's (self-given) name in the "_Chaldee MS._" was "the
+Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men."
+
+[132] Maupassant's ineffable hero and title-giver.
+
+[133] Hardly any school-boy of my or Stevenson's generation would have
+needed a reference to the _Essay on Murder_. But I am told that De
+Quincey has gone out of fashion, with school-boys and others.
+
+[134] We know now: also what "The Duke" said when consulted. They did
+not agree with Stevenson, but then they knew all the facts and he did
+not.
+
+[135] I should have held it myself, if the facts had been what R. L. S.
+thought them.
+
+[136] Which of course is Mr. Kipling's property, not mine. But he has
+most kindly joined in, authorising its publication, and that of the rest
+of the letter as far as he is concerned.
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+The Peace
+of the Augustans
+
+A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature
+as a Place of Rest and Refreshment
+
+_Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net_
+
+     "No one living," according to the _Times_, "knows English
+     eighteenth century literature as well as Mr. Saintsbury
+     knows it.... If you do not know and like your eighteenth
+     century, then he will make you; and if you do, he will show
+     you that even what you thought the dullest parts are full of
+     rest and refreshment."
+
+     In the opinion of the _Spectator_, "Mr. Saintsbury in his
+     new book has given to the world a singularly delightful
+     gift. _The Peace of the Augustans_ is in no sense written
+     down. Yet every page is so subtly seasoned with amusing
+     comment, and the whole book is so charmingly garnished that
+     none but a dullard could fail to find delight in its
+     perusal, however little he knew of the spirit which animated
+     the eighteenth century. One can hardly imagine better
+     reading after a day of hard or uncongenial work."
+
+     "No bush is necessary to proclaim where good wine may be
+     had," says the _Glasgow Herald_, "and no author's name was
+     required to indicate the source of this always fresh and in
+     some respects original treatment of the Augustan
+     literature.... In literature there are many mansions, and
+     Mr. Saintsbury is at home in them all.... A book it has been
+     very pleasant and very profitable to read."
+
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2
+
+
+
+Handbooks of
+English Literature
+
+Edited by the late J. W. HALES, M.A.
+
+Professor of English Literature, King's College, London
+
+_Small Crown 8vo. 5s. net each_
+
+
+     =THE AGE OF ALFRED= (664-1154). By F. J. SNELL, M.A.
+
+     =THE AGE OF CHAUCER= (1346-1400). By F. J. SNELL, M.A., with
+     an Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. _Third edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF TRANSITION= (1400-1580). By F. J. SNELL, M.A. In
+     2 vols. With Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES, Vol.
+     I.--Poetry. Vol. II.--Prose and Drama. _Third edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE= (1579-1631). By THOMAS SECCOMBE and
+     J. W. ALLEN. In 2 vols. Vol. I.--Poetry and Prose, with an
+     Introduction by PROFESSOR HALES. Vol. II.--Drama. _Seventh
+     edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF MILTON= (1632-1660). By Rev. Canon J. H. B.
+     MASTERMAN, M.A., with an Introduction, &c., by J. BASS
+     MULLINGER, M.A. _Eighth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF DRYDEN= (1660-1700). By the late RICHARD
+     GARNETT, C.B., LL.D. _Eighth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF POPE= (1700-1744). By JOHN DENNIS. _Tenth
+     edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF JOHNSON= (1744-1798). By THOMAS SECCOMBE.
+     _Seventh edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH= (1798-1832). By PROFESSOR C. H.
+     HERFORD, Litt.D. _Twelfth edition._
+
+     =THE AGE OF TENNYSON= (1830-1870). By PROFESSOR HUGH WALKER,
+     M.A. _Ninth edition._
+
+LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. 2
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes                                          |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 108: full stop inserted after "Duke of Burgundy"        |
+  | Page 125: Second opening parenthesis from before "Cambridge  |
+  | University Press" removed                                    |
+  | Page 245: Removed closing parenthesis following "the Valley  |
+  | of the Shadow of Frederick"                                  |
+  | Page 260: "sunday" _sic_                                     |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Generally spelling, capitalization and punctuation in        |
+  | letters has been retained as per the book, with the          |
+  | following exceptions:                                        |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 305: Removed closing quote marks following "terrain"    |
+  | (Letter 54)                                                  |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Letter Book, by George Saintsbury
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