INTRODUCTION.

LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS.

It would seem to those who study the subject of letterwriting as an art that, simple as it appears, it must be one of the most difficult ever practised by man for the delight of his fellows. There must be needed, for the highest excellence, some inborn gift or grace, some delicacy of touch, and a fine sense of the fitness of things, which education alone can do little to produce; or surely, when we consider the spread of culture and the growth of general literary appreciativeness, we might expect the last hundred years to have produced a greater number of famous letter-writters than any other age that has gone before. And yet, in looking back on the history of the art, we find that the men and women whom the critics of the eighteenth century pronounced first and best in this rare accomplishment remain unsurpassed, and that, with two or three doubtful exceptions, we have added no names to the list of famous correspondents handed down to us by these elder generations.

The conditions of life, it is true, are now less favourable to the careful composition of letters. For we have ceased now to look to letters for the freshest public news, and the most free expression and discussion of political opinion. It may be questioned, however, whether at any period elaborate letters on such subjects were the most highly esteemed; and, after liberal allowance is made for the altered conditions of letter

writing, consequent on the activity of the popular press, the telegraph, the railway, and the steamboat, there is still left what the immortal Mr. Brooke would term "a wide field" for the writer of the familiar letter. And the familiar letter, if genuinely good, was, and is, and ever will remain the best that can be written.

For this style, almost the only rule upon which those best qualified to decide are agreed, is the one so emphatically given by Erasmus: a good letter ought to be extempore. In this opinion Madame de Sévigné, Cowper, and Burke concur. Even Johnson, whose taste in general literature was far from simple, declares in the Rambler that the best letters are those where ease and simplicity distinguish the style, and where the flow of thought is artless and free from studied arrangement.

It is needless to say that the somewhat dreary and now antiquated fashion of writing letters with an object requires a different style. For these laborious efforts an elaborate art is necessary; and it must be owned that success has seldom attended the attempt to convey instruction in this form. The shelves of our libraries groan under the weight of neglected volumes of forgotten letters on European history, science, travels, and the like, which had not enough of wit in them to keep them sweet.

Pretty much the same may be said of multitudes of famous political and other polemical letters which made a great stir in their own day. Though often familiarly referred to by writers, there is reason to suspect that they are oftener talked of than read. Whether ponderous or polished, bristling with pointed epigram, or savage in personal attack, they have had their day, and only a very select few are remembered as of real historic interest for their remarkable power. Such, for example, are the letters of Junius. So weighty and incisive were these on their first appearance, that the political authorities of the day awaited, as on the rack, every fresh attack of their mysterious and omniscient critic. Such also are Swift's Drapier letters, whose scathing satire exposed the disgraceful affair of the

debased Irish coinage; Cartwright's Utopian letters on American Independence and on Liberty; Middleton's letters from Rome, full of ingenious arguments to prove that the Roman religious rites were in reality survivals of Pagan ceremonies; Peter Plymley's Letters, written by Sydney Smith in promotion of the cause of Catholic Emancipation, with a wit and irony rivalling Swift's; Milman's Letters to a Prebendary, acute, learned and brilliant; and many other similar productions. These and such like, though adopting the forms of the epistolary art, were in reality masterly treatises, and therefore can scarcely come within the scope of these remarks.

Nor can the didactic letters, so dear to some dull minds in the last century, be fairly considered here. No dryer method of imparting instruction has ever been invented. The present generation, which is somewhat averse from receiving information in this form, has ceased to pay heed to the admonitions of Mrs. Chapone and Lord Chesterfield, or to the more ancient letters of Sir Henry Sidney to his famous son Sir Philip; although it has been quaintly observed that if the father's letters had any part in forming so perfect a character as that of the Elizabethan hero, the practice of writing in this manner might with advantage be reintroduced.

But the letters which are for all time are such as arise naturally out of the everyday pursuits of the writer, and display unconsciously his inner and true self, with his views of life expressed honestly and without constraint. Since men first learned to bridge over the dreariness of distance by written words, letters such as these have existed, and many have fortunately been preserved to present to us invaluable pictures of the inner life of past ages. And side by side with them there have been handed down to us more conscious and elaborate epistolary compositions, carefully prepared for the public eye, and losing value in certain respects in proportion to the amount of conscious effort expended on them. Going back to classic days, we find but few

letter-writers who could escape from the trammels of the received style of rhetorical display. Beautiful as are the celebrated letters of Pliny the Younger, a certain sense of over-elaborate finish has led many critics to suppose that even this humane and tranquil sage had ever before him, in writing his ten books of Letters, the idea that they would be judged less as familiar letters than as literary compositions. Nevertheless their place is a high one, though not the highest, amongst the precious remains of classical antiquity. They contain vivid pictures of the great events of his time, with graphic descriptions of the memorable persecutions of the Christians. They show us how he lived his pleasant time, delighting in literature and in philanthropy, turning his attention to the cultivation of his estate when the performance of his important duties as Roman pro-consul of Bithynia gave him leisure for home-life. Taken as a whole they are all but faultless letters-models of style and grace-instructive, but not over-burdened with instruction; retaining in their English dress their native power to charm.

Frequently as the comparison has been drawn. between the Letters of Pliny and the Letters of Cicero, the conclusion seems to be ever the same. Cicero, it is

acknowledged, excels in those touches of nature that make the whole world kin; and we, in the latter years of the nineteenth century, may clearly see across some fifty generations the workings of the mind of the great Roman, with its weaknesses and all its noble traits, as if he had been an eminent contemporary just gone from among us. Beginning in the year B.C. 68, Cicero's extant correspondence carries us, charmed and fascinated, through the subsequent history of his stirring times and his brilliant restless career. We see him elated with his success, and full of generous thought for others in his time of triumph, when he could truly boast that "to him was owing the salvation of both the city and the commonwealth;" and we trace him through the strangely varied scenes of his life to the pathetic moment when, a fugitive exile from the Rome he saved,

he penned to his wife that most touching of letters, in which he confesses that as he tries to write the tears blind his weary eyes. The insight they give us into the man's passionately earnest and ardent nature, is something quite unique in the letter-writing of any age. We know him almost as he knew himself; with his tender love of home, and wife, and children-such a love of hearth and home as Macaulay has so nobly described in one of his finest lays with his playful wit, his yearning for sympathy, his tenderness of heart, and his exalted philosophy. In all his descriptions of men and things around him, there is a freshness which would give interest to the driest subject, and a fulness of detail which renders these glimpses into ancient Roman life exceedingly valuable to us now. Nothing to equal these letters in charm and interest has been spared us from antiquity, and the many modern writers who have commented on them, and vainly tried to find words wherein to describe the peculiar power of their style, have not yet exhausted their great subject. De Quincey describes them as "all-embracing;" and a German writer, who endeavours to convey some idea of the cause of their immortality, has told us that it may be that they delight us by reason of the feminine quality of the mind of the writer, and because of his inexhaustible and far-extended sympathies, and his entire loveableness. This reason-though like many German solutions of literary problems it is somewhat far-fetched-may partly explain the hold Cicero's letters have had on so many great minds as ideally perfect examples of a difficult art; for it has often been said that all the most noble men have something of the woman in them. And, indeed, no woman writing of her children, could surpass in tenderness those parts of Cicero's private correspondence where his well-beloved little son and daughter are described as the pride and delight of his life. Speaking of the girl Tullia with the loving diminutive Tulliola, he tells his friend in one letter that she sends imperious child-like messages, and in another that she institutes an action for breach of contract inasmuch as