A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing

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 Transcriber's Note Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document. 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 [v] 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.

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• Publié par: nosor
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 146
• Langue: English

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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 tex.t For a completeil s ,tplease see the bottom of this documen . t 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 pubilshers were good enough to propose that  Ishould undertake this book ,they were also good enough to sugges ttha tthe Introduciton should be of a character somewha tdifferent from that o fa school-anthology ,and should attemp tto deal with the Art o fLetter-wiritng ,and the nature of the Letter, as such. I formed a plan accordingly, by which the letters, and their separate Prefatory Notes ,migh tbe 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  referirng to both book and author , Ithough tit well to look up nex twha thad been done int he way before me, at least to the exten tof 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 ealriest tweniteth century books—Roberts's History o fLetter Wirting  (1843) with Pickering's ever-beloved title-page and his beauitful 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; ifnally, two Essays in Dr. Jessopp's Studies by a Recluse and in the Men and Letters  of M.r Herber tPaul, once a very frequen tassociate of mine .The itlte o fthe ifrs tmentioned book speaks i tpretty thoroughly ."The Ar to fLetter Wriitng: Divided into Two Parts. The Firs :tContaining Rules and Directions for wiritng letters on all sorts of subjects [ this line as well as several others is Rubircked ] with a variety of examples equally elegant and instrucitve .The Second: a Colleciton of Letters on the Mos tinteresitng occasions of ilfe in which are inserted—The proper method of Addressing Persons of all ranks ;some necessary orthographical directions ,the rightf orms o fmessagef or cards; and thoughts upon a multipilcity o fsubjects ;the whole composed upon an entirely new plan—chielfy 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 poilte epistolary intercourse." May our own litlte book have no worse fortune! M.r Roberts's avowedly restricts itselt fot heif fth century as a terminus ad quem , though i tprofesses to start "from the earilest times," and its seven hundred pages deal very honeslty and fully with their subjects .The essays of D.r 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." tI canno tbe too often or too solemnly laid down that an adoration of Madame de Sévigné as a letter- writer is not crotche tor fashion or affectaiton—is no result of merely taking authoirty on trus .tThe 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 vairous modern repirnts 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, no tas examples of ar:t and therefore he does no ,texcept in possible glances ,require further attention, though the booki s 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 ,bu tno ,tlike Macaulay's, superifcially insisten ton superficial defects ,and ought no tto be neglected by anyone who studies the subject. If ,howevert ,here was no need to rely on any oft hese books, they did nothing to hinder in the peculiar way in which I had feared some hindrance. For it is a nuisance to ifnd tha tsomebody else has done something in the precise wayi n which you have planned doing it. I have not yet encountered that nuisance here. D.r Jessopp's general plani s mostl ike mine—indeed some simliairty was unavoidable: but the two are not identical, and I had planned mine before I knew anything about his. So witht his prelude le tus go to business ,only premising furthert hat the object, unlike that of the anonymous Augustan, is not to "give rules and instructions for wirting good letters," except in the way (which far excels all rules and instrucitons) o fshowing how good letters have been written .Let us also modestly trus ttha tthe collection may deal with some "interesitng occasions of ilfe" and contain "thoughts on a [fair] multiplicity of subjects." Having been ,as above observed ,unable duirng the composition o fthis book to visi tLondon or Oxford , Ihave had to rely occasionally on firendly assistance. I owe paritcular thanks (as indeed I have owed them at almost any time these forty years) to the Rev. William Hunt ,D.Litt,. Honorary Fellow o fTrinity College ,Oxford: and  Iam 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, M.r Kipling and Dr. Williamsoni n the texti n reference to certain new or almost newl etters, we owe very sincere graittude for permissiont o repirntt he following importan tmatters: His Honour Judge Parry. Two letters from "Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple." Messrs. Douglas & Foulis   . A letter to Joanna Balilie ,from "Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scot.t" Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co   . Two letters from Mrs .Calryle's "Letters and Memoirals," 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" ;onel etter 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 o fElizabeth Barrett Browning." GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 1 Royal Crescen ,tBath,        October, 1921 . CONTENTS page Preface v Introduction ont he History and Ar to fLetter-Wriitng 1 I .Ancien tHistory .II .Letters in English—before 1700II .I .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—Preparaitons to mee tRaiders. (ii) To Hypatia—Longing bu tunablet o comet o her. Latin Letters—Pliny 102 Accepts a Bireff or a Lady. Letters ot fhe "Dark" Ages—Sidonius Apolilnairs 105 The exploits of Ecdicius. Early Mediaeval (Tweltfh Century) Letter 108 Duchess of Burgundyt o King Louis VI.I—Matchmaking. ENGLISH LETTERS The "Paston" Letters 111 1. A Channel Fight. 2 .Margeryi s Willing. Roger Ascham 116 3. "Up the Rhine." 4. Nostalgia for Cambirdge. Lady Mary Sidney 122 5. Have you no room at Court? George Cilfford ,Earl of Cumberland 125 6. A Death-bed letter. John Donne 129 7-10 .Letters to Magdalen Lady Herber.t 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 Switf 154 16 .Letter-hunger. Lady Mary Worltey-Montagu 159 17 .Direcitonsf or running away with her. Phiilp Dormer Stanhope, Ealr o fChesterifeld 164 18. Some manners that make a genlteman. George Ballard 173 19. The wickedness of Reviewers. Thomas Gray 180 20 .Romanities and Plain Engilsh. 21. Ken ,tRousseau, 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 .Vegetaiton ,stagnaiton ,and assassinaiton. 27. His "hotel." Hasty judgments deprecated. Sir Walter Scott 206 28. Authors and Morals. Samuel Taylor Coleirdge 212 29. From Spinosa to Go b win through things in general. Robert Southey 217 30-33. The Lingo Grande . Chalres Lamb 221 34 .A Sigh for Soiltude. 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 Quartelry and Charmian. The Calryles 244 38. Thomas on Latrappism . 39. Jane Welsh on her Travels. 40. Jane Welsh on the blessings of Photography. Thomas Babington Macaulay 253 41 .Ouftits, and Election Dinners. Miss Berry and Lady Holland. Thomas Lovell Beddoes 258 42 .Stage-coach tircks ,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 .Bakespeairsm. William Makepeace Thackeray 279 47. As himself. 48. In character. Charles Dickens 286 49 .Straigh tdeailng witht he personages of Nicholas Nickleby . 50. Advice to an Innocent in London. 51. Mr. and Mrs. Harirs. Chalres 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 mos tthings 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 amoun tof truth .The most famiilar 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 resurrecitonary 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 themi ,n composing this little paper, which aims at being a discussion of the Letter as a branch of Literature, no less than ani ntroduction tot he specimens oft he kind which follow. I ,faccording to a famous dictum ,"Everything has been said," it follows that every deifniiton must have been already made .Therefore, no doub ,tsomebody has ,or many bodies have ,before now deifned or a tleast described the Letter as that kind of communicaiton of thought or fact to another person which most immediately succeeds the oral ,and suppiles the claims of absence .You want to tell somebody something ;bu the 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 "wirte." A tifrst no doubt ,you used signs or symbols like the feather with which Wildrake let Cromwel'ls adven tbe 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 interconneciton o fthe two sufficiently. There is probably more than one person ilving who has received a reply beginning "Dear So-and-So ,Thanks for youri nteresitng and paritally legible  epistle," or words tot ha teffec .tBu tthat is a par tot fhe matter which lies outside our range. On the probable general fac,t howeve,r some observaitons may be less firvolously based. fI this were a sentimental age, as some agesi n the past have been ,one migh tassume that, as the ifrs tportrait is supposed to have been a slihouette o fthe present beloved, drawn on her shadow with a charcoaled sitck, so the same ,or another implemen tmay have served (on wha tsubsittute for paper anybody pleases) to communicate with her when absent. But the slliiness of this age—though far be it from us to dispute its possession o fso prevaiilng a quality—does not taket hef orm—at leas t this form—of sentiment. There is, moreover ,nothing silly or senitmental, though of THE BEGINNINGS 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 sophisitcated par ,to fNature) thel ess the letter-writer forgets that he is merely substituting pen for tongue the bette.r Of courset ,hei nstruments andt he circumstances being different ,the methods and canons o fthe proceedings wlil be differen ttoo .In the letter there is no intelrocutor ;and there is no possibility o fwha twe may call accompanying it with personalli lustraitons [1]  and demonstraitons,i  fnecessary or agreeable. But stlil it may be laid down, with some conifdence, that the more the spoken word is heard in al etter the bette ,rand thel ess tha twordi s heard—the more i tgives way to "book"-talk—the worse. Indeed this is not likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almos tinifnite possibiilties o fdifferences in personal opinion as to wha tconstitutes the desirable mixture o fvairation and similarity between a conversaiton and a letter. Let us ,before discussin this or sain

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anything more abou tthe pirnciples, say something about the history o fthis, at bes tso deilghftul ,at worst so undelightful ar.t For i fHistory ,in the transferred sense of paritcular books called "histoires," is rather apt to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense wlli 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 .Onlyt he Pasi ttsel fabides our knowledge. Of the oldest exis it ng examples of epistolary BIBLICAL EXAMPLES correspondence, except those contained in the Bible, the presen twirter knows little or nothing .Fo,r except a vanished smatteirng o fHebrew ,he "has" no Oriental tongue ;he has never been much addicted to reading translaitons, and eveni  fhe had been so has hadl itlte occasion to draw him to such studies ,and much to draw him away from them. There certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens o fthe more passionate letter wriitng in ancient if not exaclty pre- Chirsitan Chinese, and probably in other tongues—but it is ill talking o fwhat one does not know .In the Scirptures themselves letters do not come ealry ,and the "token" peirod probably lastedl ong. 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 imprope ,rto devote much space here to the sacred epistolographers .But one may wonder whether many people have appreciated the humour of the two episltes 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 sufifced for "the Hebrew and the Chaldee." The exact authenticity of these fuller texts is a matter o fno importance ,bu ttheir substance, whetheri t was the work o fa Persian civli servan tor of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever it was, he knew King's Speeches and communicaitonsf rom "My lords" and such liket hings, very welli ndeed; and the contras tof the meniton in the first letter o f"Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was approved for his constan tgood 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 respecitve 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, no tmuch abou tletters in the Bible. tI is no tauspicious that among the excepitons come David's letter commanding the betrayal o fUirah, and a ilttle later Jezebe'ls simliar prescripiton 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 gloirous within—" and withou t(as the Higher Criitcismi nterprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland way with which she hersel fsitpulates that the false witnesses shall be "sons of Belial." There is a book (once much uitilsed as a school pirze) entitled The History of Invenitons  . Ido no tknow whether therei s a "Dicitonary of Attributed Inventors."  fIthere were it would contain some queer examples. One of the queeres tis 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 M.r 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 i.t Bu tit is perfeclty certain that she did not, and no one who combines, as all true scholars should endeavour to combine, an unquenchable cuirosity to know wha tcan be known and is worth knowing with a placid resignaiton to ignorance of wha tcanno tbe 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 Egypitan letters o fimmense anitquity 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 no twirte .Besides ,for practical purposes ,all our ilterature begins with Greek: so to Greek le tus turn. We have a fair bulk o fletters in that language .Herche'rs 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 ,ilke the majority o flater Greek literature, is the work o ftha tspecial class called rhetoricians—a class for which, though our term "book-makers" may be a little too derogatory ,"men o fletters" is rarely i( tis someitmes) applicable, as we use it when we mean to be complimentary. These letters are sitll closet o "speech,"t hus meeting in a fashion our initial requiremen ,tbu tthey are close to the speech of the "orator"—o fthe sophisitcated speaker to the pubilc—no tto tha to fgenuine conversation. In fac tin some cases it would require only the very slightest change to make those exercitations of the rhetors which are no tcalled "epistles" definite letters in form, while some o fthe best known and characteristic ot fheir works are so enitlted. It was unfortunate for the Greeks, as it would seem, and for THE RHETORICIANS us more certainly ,tha tletter-wirting was so much affected by these "rhetoircians." This curious class o fpersons has perhaps been too much abused :and there is no doubt tha tvery great wirters came out of them—to meniton one only in each division—Lucian among the extremely profane ,and S .tAugustine among the greatest and most intellectual of divines. Bu tthough 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 ancienlty they were united in this one. We have our journailsts ,our book- makers (literary, not sporting) ,our plaftorm and pailramentary palaverers, our popular entertainers ;and we also have our pedagogues ,scholasitc and collegiate ,our scienitifc and other lecturers ,etc .Bu tthe Rhetorician of old was a Jack of all these trades ;and he too frequenlty combined the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one division with the pirggishness, the lack o ftact and humour ,and above all the pseudo-scientiifc tendencyt o generalisation, classification and, to use af amiliar word, "pottering" o fthe othe.r In paritcular he had a maniai n his more serious moodsf or deifning and sub-deifning things and putting them into pigeon-holes under the sub- deifniitons. Thus the so-called Demetrius Phalereus, who (or a false namesake of his) has left us a capital general  remark (to be given presenlty) 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," "quesitoning," "answeirng," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing," "defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," whlie the neo-Platonist ,Proclus, is responsible for ,or a tleas thas attributed to him ,a ils to fnearly double the length ,including most of those given above and adding many .Of these last ,"lovel-etters"i st he mosti mportan ,tand "mixed" the cannies , t  fori t pracitcallyl ets in everything. This way, of course, except for purely business purposes—where established forms save time, trouble and possible ilitgaiton—no possible good iles; and indeed the impossibliity thereof is clealry enough indicated in the above- glanced-at general remark of Demetrius (or whoever it was) himself. In fact the pirnciple of this remark and its context in the work called "Of Interpretaiton," which i tis more usual now to call ,perhaps a ilttle rashly, "O fStyle," 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 o fwiritng, 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 anitcipates the most famous and bes tdeifniitons of Style itself ,as being "the very man," and they may perhaps also think worthy of notice another passage in the same contex twhere the author ifnds fault with a rather "fine" piece of an epislte as "no tthe way a man would talk to his firend," and even goes on to use the most familiar Greek word for talking—λαλε ῖ ν—in the same connection. Of such "talking with a firend" we have unfortunately very ALCIPHRON. JULIAN few examples—hardly any a tall—from older Greek. The greater collecitons— no tmuch usedi n schools or colleges now but well enough knownt ot hose who really know Greek Literature—of Alciphron, Airstaenetus, Philostratus and (once most famous of all) Phalaris are—one must not perhaps say obvious, since men o fno illtte worth were once taken in by them but—pretty easliy discoverable counterfeits .They are sometimes, more paritculalry those of Philostratus, interesitng and even beauitful [ ; 2]  they have been again someitmes at least supposed ,paritculalry those of Alciphron, to give us ,from the fac tthat they were largely based upon los tcomedies, etc,.i nformaiton 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 personaitng dead authors, or that o flaying traps for histoirans .Ii ts enough that they do no tgive us, excep tvery rarely ,goodl etters: and that even these excepitons are no tin any probability real  letters, real written "confabulaitons o ffirends" at all .Almos tthe ifrs twe have deserving such a description are those of the Emperor Julian in the fourth century of that Chirs tfor whom he had such an unfortunate hatred ;the most copious and thoroughly genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a ilttle later. Of these Juilan's are a good deal affected by the inlfuence o fRhetoirc ,of which he was a great culitvator :and the pecuilar later Platonism of Synesius iflls a larger proporiton o fhist han somef irvolous persons might wish. Julian is event hought to have "written for pubilcaiton," as Latin epistolers of disitnction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless it is pleasant to read the Apostate when he is no ttalking Imperial or anti-Chirstian "shop," bu twiritng to his tuto,r 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 migh twrite to an undonnish don .tI is stlli pleasanter to find Synesius telilng his friends about the very thin wine and very thick honey of Cyrenaica; making love ("camouflaged," as they say to-day, under philosophy) to Hypaita ,and condescending to mention dogs, horses and hunitng now and then. But it is unfortunately undeniable that the bulk of this department of Greek ilterature is spuirous to begin with, and uninteresitng ,even i fspuirousness be permitted to pass .The Letters o fPhalairs—once famous in themselves, again so as furnishing one o fthe chie fbaltte-grounds in the "Ancien tand Modern" quarrel, and never to be forgotten because of their conneciton with Swift's Batlte of the Books —are as dull as ditchwater in matte ,rand utterly destitute of literary distincitoni n style. Ii ts a rule, general and almos tuniversal, that every branch ROMAN LETTER- o fLaitn ilterature is founded on, and more or less direclty WRITING imitaitve of Greek. Even the Saitre, which the Romans relied upon to prove that they could oirginate ,is more apparenlty than really an inveniton .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-wiritng may be said to be an excepiton. Unless we have been singulalry unlucky in losing better Greek letters than we have, and extraordinarliy fortunate in Fate's seleciton o fthe Latin letters that have come down to us, the Romans, though they were eager students of Rhetoirc, and almost outwent their teachers in composing the empty things called Declamaitons, seem to have allowed this very pracitce to drain o ffmere 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 lfouirshing itme o fthe ilterature as those of Cicero, o fPilny [3]  and even of Seneca—whlie as we approach the "Dark" Ages Juilan and Synesius in the older language cannot touch Sidonius Apoillnaris or perhaps Cassiodorus [4]  in the younge.r O fcourse all these are beyond reasonable doubt genuine, while the Greek letters attirbuted to Plato ,Socrates and other great men are almost without doub tand without excepiton spurious .But there is very illtte likeilhood tha tthe Greeks of the great times wrote many "matter-ful" letters a tall .They lived in small communiites ,where they saw each other daliy and almos thoulry ;they took litlte interes tin the affairs of other communiites unless they were at war with them ,and when they did travel there were very few means of internaitonal communicaiton. Women write the bes tletters, and get the best letters written to them: but i tis doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class and other exceptions in differen tways like Sappho and Diotima [ , 5]  ever wrote a tall .The Romans, atfer their ealry period, were no tmerely a larger and ever larger community full o fthe mos tvairous business, and constanlty 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 wel ack women's letters; but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly off for those of men .There have even been some audacious hereitcs who have preferred Cicero's letters to his speeches and treaitses; Seneca, the least attractive of those before mentioned, pu twell wha tthe poe tWordsworth 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 presen twirte,r the late Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a special favourite of Pliny ;and i fpeople can ifnd nothing worse to say agains tSidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and not in wha twas for his itme archaic, Laitn, his case will nol took badi nt he eyes of sensible men. Sidonius, like Synesius ,was a Chirstian ,and, though the SIDONIUS observaiton may seem no more logical than Fluellen's about Macedon and Monmouth, besides being in more doubtful taste, there would seem to be some conneciton between the spread of Christianity and tha tof letter-wiritng .At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps because o fthe deifciency of formal ilterature duirng the "Dark" Ages. I tis no treally futile to poin tou ttha ta very large part of the New Testament consists of "Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these episltes is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter .Even that whichi s so ,otfeni  fno talways, partakes of the character o fa "live"l etter to an extent which makes the so-called letters o fthe 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 excellen tadvice to Timothy abou tbeverages ,are all the pures tand most genuine matter for mali-bags .So is St. Peter's very genltemanil-ke (as it has been termed) retort to his brother Aposlte; and so are both the Second and the Third o fSt .John. Indeed it is not fanciful to suggest thatt he account of the voyage whichf inishest he "Acts," and other parts of that very delighftul book ,are narraitves much more o fthe kind one ifndsi nl etterst han oft he formally historical sort. However this may be, it is worth pointing out that the distrust of other pagan kinds o filterature which the Fathers manifested so strongly ,and which was inheirted from them by the clergy o fthe "Dark," and to some exten tthe Middle Ages, clearly could no textend to the practice o fthe Aposltes .fI from the Dark Ages themselves we have not very many, it must be remembered that from them we have iltlte ilterature at all :whlie from the close o ftha tpeirod and the beginning of the nex twe have one o fthe mos tfamous of all correspondences, the Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Of the intirnsic meri tof these long-and far- famed compositions, as displaying character, there have been different opinions—one o fthe most damaging attacks on them may be found in Barbey d'Aurevlily's already mentioned book .Bu ttheir influence has been lasitng and enormous :and even if it were to turn out that they are forgeires ,they are certainly early forgeires ,and the person who forged them knew extremely well wha the was about. There is no room here to survey, even in seleciton ,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 Engilsh letters [ . 6] But the ever-increasing bonds of union—even of such union in disunion as war— between differen tEuropean naitons, and the developments o fmore complex civiilsaiton, o fmore general education and the ilke—all tended and wrought in the same direciton. II LETTERS IN ENGLISH—BEFORE 1700 Exceptions have sometimes been taken to the earliest collection of genuine pirvatel etters ,not ofifcial communicaitons wirtten in or inspired by Laitn—which we possess in Engilsh ."The Paston Letters" have been, from opposite sides, accused of wan tof ilterary form and of not giving us interesitng enough details in substance .The objecitons in either case [7] are untenable, and in both rather silly .In the first place "literary form" in the iffteenth century was exceedingly ilkely to be bad literary form, and we are much better off withou tit .Unless Sir Thomas Malory had happened to be chaplain at Oxnead, or Sir John Fortescue had occupied there something ilke the position of M.r Tulkinghorn in Bleak House , we should no thave go tmuch "ilterature" from any known prose-wirter of the period. Nor was i twanted. As for interesitngness o fmatte,r the people who expect newspaper-correspondent fine writing about the Wars of the Roses may be disappointed ;bu tsome of us who have had expeirence o ftha tdialect fromt he Russells ot fhe Crimea through the Forbeses o f1870 to the chroniclers of Armageddon the other day will probably not be very unhappy. The Paston Letters are simply genuine famliy correspondence—of a genuineness all the more certain because o ftheir commonplaceness . tIis impossible to conceive anything further from the initial type o fthe Greek rhetoircal "letter" of which we have jus tbeen saying something. They are no ,tto any but an excessively "high-browed" and high-lfying person, uninteresitng :but the chie fpoint 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. The next body of letters—Ascham's—which seems to call ASCHAM for notice herei s of the next centuryI . thas not a few points o fappeal ,moret han one of which concern us very nealry. Mos tof the wirters o fthe Paston Letters were, though in some cases of good rank and failry educated ,persons entirely unacademic in characte ,rand their society was tha tof the las ttrouble 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 scholalry and man-of-the-wolrdly ,a couriter and a diplomaitst as well as a "don" and a man o fletters; a sportsman as well as a schoolmaste .rAnd whlie from all these points o fview 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 tha twhlie he begins to write in Laitn—the all but mother-tongue of all scholars of the time, and the universal language of the educated, even when not deifnitely scholalry ,throughout Europe—he exchanges this for Engilsh latterly, in the same spirit which prompted his famous expression of reasons for writing th e Toxophlius  in our own and his own tongue. There is indeed a double attraction ,which has not been always or otfen noticed ,in this change of pracitce .Everybody has seen how important it is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "ilke to play the bankrup twith books," bu tas protesting by anticipaiton against the continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was no tenitrely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne. Bu tperhaps everybody has not seen how by impilcaiton it acknowledges the peculiar character of the genuine letter—that, though it may be a work o far ,tit should not be one o faritfice—that i tis 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 coinciden tend o fthe reign of Eilzabeth, we have a considerable bulk o fletter-wriitng of more or less varied kinds. The greatest men o fletters of the itme—to the disgus tof one ,but not wholly so to tha tof another, class of "scholar"—give us iltlte. Spenser is the mos tconsiderable excepiton: and his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, though iti s personal to a certain exten tand on Gabrie'ls side sufifciently character-reveailng ,is really of the hybird kind ,partaking rather more o fpamphlet or essay than of letter prope .rIndeed a good par tof that very remarkable pamphlet-literature of this itme ,which has perhaps scarcely yet received its due share of atteniton ,takes the letter-form: but is mostly even farther from genuine letter-wiritng than the correspondence of "Immeirto" 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, no tvery many ,agreeable letters o fstirclty pirvate character in whole or part, the pleasantest of all perhaps being some of Sir Philip Sydney's mother ,Lady Mary Dudley. Others are from itme to itme being made public, such as those in Dr .Williamson's recent book on the Admiral-Earl of Cumbelrand. 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 .in.f ) this corpus would expose itself tot he criticism that the itmef or perfec tletter-wriitng was not quite ye,ti n this day o fso much that was perfec ,tthat the style was no tquite the irght style ,the knack no tye tquite achieved .And i fthe presen twirter—who swore fealty to Elizabethan ilterature a full third of a century ago after informal allegiance for nearly asl ong ait me ealrier—admits somet ruthi n this, there probablyi s some. The letters included in it attract us more for the matter they contain than for the manner in which they contain i:t and when this is the case no branch of ilterature has perfected itselfi n ar.t The position of the seventeenth century in England with THE SEVENTEENTH regard to letter-wiritng has been the subject o frather CENTURY different opinions. The bulk o fits contributions is o fcourse very considerable: and some of the groups are of prominen timportance ,the mos tsingula,r if not the most excellent ,being Cromwel'ls, again to be menitoned .Asi n other cases and departments this century offers a curious "split" between its eariler part which declines—not in goodness bu tlike human life in vitality—from ,bu tstill preserves the character o,f the pure Eilzabethan, and its late,r which grows up again—not in goodness but simply in the same vitality—towards the Augustan. This relationship is sufifcienltyli lustratedi n the actual letters. The great political importance o fthe Civli War of course reflects itsel fin them .Indeed it may almos tbe saidt hat for some time letters are wholly concerned with sucht hings, though of course there are parital exceptions ,such as those o fDorothy 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 somewha tealrier letters o fJames Howell—our first examples perhaps o fletters "written for pubilcaiton" in the fulles tsense, very agreeably vairedi n subject and grea tfavourites with a good many people ,notably Thackeray—bu tonly in part (if a tall) genuine pirvate correspondence. No taf ew men otherwise disitnguishedi nl iterature wrote letters—someitmes in cuirous contrast with other producitons of theirs. The most remarkablei nstance 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 expec tfrom the remainder—whether actually extan ,tmislaid orl ost— anything bettert han 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 mos tpar textremely dull ;whlie propirety is certainly not the mos tsailen tcharacterisitc of the Diary ;and the diairst manages ,in the most eccentric manne,r to communicate interes tnot merely to things more specially regarded as "interesting," but to his accounts and his ailments, his business and his poiltical history .His contemporary and rather atronisin firend Eveln kees his erformances less far aar tfrom

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