woman of thirty, rather too faded and patient looking, perhaps, and with a redness about her eyes, as if she were tired, or troubled. The man sitting next to her was a few years older, slight, bright-eyed, but curiously apathetic; a sandy, meek, subservient sort of man, with a neat moustache, a watchful, unobtrusive air, and the figure of a boy; a grocer's assistant probably, or a small shopkeeper. The third of the party was a young fellow of twenty, restless, voluble, apparently high-spirited; and from his likeness to the woman I put him down as a younger brother of hers. He sprang up every other minute to check his watch against the station clock; he talked incessantly, with a self-conscious facetiousness; evidently the wit of his circle, in ordinary circumstances, and keen on living up to his character. Now and then the woman answered him, as if with an effort, and laughed; but the little man, her husband, remained stolidly unresponsive. Each was cumbered with parcels, and a monster traveling trunk billowed at their feet.

When the train came, they followed into the same carriage with me, and as the big trunk was heaved in I saw on the end of it the elaborate label of a Canadian shipping company, and on the side a smaller label with 'Settlers' Luggage' on it in large letters. Then I knew they were emigrants, and became interested in them. They were going from a little town some twenty miles outside London, and I decided that the elder man had failed in business, or been long out of employment. He sat staring straight before him, and took no last looks at the fields and homely clusters of houses that cinematographed past the windows; he seemed numbed by this uprooting of himself, or indifferent, or relieved that he was quitting forever a place where he had

suffered too much of poverty and anxiety.

'Hullo!' the younger man ejaculated a minute after we had started; 'this here label's coming off.'

'Wet it with your finger,' said the woman dully. 'It's the gum.'

He slapped his finger noisily on his tongue, and moistened the back of the loose label with burlesque energy:

'Don't forget the twiddly bit;
Straighten out the middly bit!'

he guffawed, and the woman gave a short, shrill laugh; the elder man wreathed his lips in a momentary, mirthless smile; and the humorist, thus encouraged, went on to babble foolishly gay things about persons who were doubtless common friends of the three, cracking the inanest of inane jokes without scoring any further successes.

They glanced casually toward the window as we stopped at the next station, and gathered their parcels together to make room when three or four strangers filtered in and filled the carriage. As we swept into the second station there were four girls eagerly on the watch; they caught sight of the woman, who sat by the window opposite me, ran to keep pace with us, and slowed, as we slowed, to a standstill bright, well-dressed, good-looking girls, who nodded and smiled and waved their hands, and came chattering and laughing to the door. The two men kept their seats, but the woman rose and leaned out, and one after the other they kissed her.

'Now, mind you write! Hope you have a nice voyage. Send us a picture post card!' There was something heartening in the chorus of fresh young girlish voices; then abruptly a change flashed over the eager, laughing girl who was nearest it was as if a mask had slipped suddenly from her face, and showed it a piteously distorted

They contain a hundred and eleven hitherto unpublished letters, of which the most interesting are a series written in Italy to Sir Horace Mann and two childish letters to Lady Walpole, reproduced in facsimile. Among the letters published elsewhere, but not contained in Mrs. Toynbee's edition, are an important group addressed to Henry Fox and all that is still extant of Walpole's part in his correspondence with Madame du Deffand. But the volumes are chiefly valuable for their mass of corrigenda and for the new light which they throw upon a multitude of minor matters. This additional information is almost entirely derived from the remarkable and only lately discovered collection of Walpole MSS. in the possession of Sir Wathen Waller a collection containing, as Mr. Toynbee tells us, 'private journals, notebooks, and commonplace books of Horace Walpole, together with numerous letters addressed to him, marked "for illustration," which had been carefully preserved by Walpole in a series of letter books, evidently with a view to their eventual utilization in the annotation of his own letters'; and we are glad to hear that we may look forward to the appearance of the most interesting portions of this material in two further supplementary volumes.' It would be impossible to overrate Mr. Toynbee's erudition, industry, and exactness; owing to his labors and those of the late Mrs. Toynbee, we now possess an edition of this great classic truly worthy of its immense and varied interests historical, biographical, political, psychological-and its potent literary charm. The reader who merely reads for entertainment will find a volume of this edition a perfect companion for a holiday; while its elaborate apparatus of notes, indices, and tables will supply the learned inquirer with everything that his heart

can desire. One blemish, and one only, can we discover in it: the omission of numerous passages on the score of impropriety. Surely, in a work of such serious intention and such monumental proportions the publication of the whole of the original material was not only justifiable, but demanded by the nature of the case.

Good letters are like pearls: they are admirable in themselves, but their value is infinitely enhanced when there is a string of them. Therefore, to be a really great letter writer it is not enough to write an occasional excellent letter; it is necessary to write constantly, indefatigably, with ever-recurring zest; it is almost necessary to live to a good old age. What makes a correspondence fascinating is the cumulative effect of slow, gradual, day-today development -the long, leisurely unfolding of a character and a life. The Walpole correspondence has this merit in a peculiar degree; its enormous progression carries the reader on and on through sixty years of living. Even if the individual letters had been dull, and about tedious things, a collection on such a scale could hardly have failed to be full of interest. But Walpole's letters are far from dull, and, placed as he was in the very centre of a powerful and brilliant society, during one of the most attractive epochs of English history, the topics upon which he writes are very far from tedious. The result is something that is certainly unique in our literature. Though from the point of view of style, or personal charm, or originality of observation, other letter writers may deserve a place at least on an equality with that of Walpole, it is indisputable that the collected series of his letters forms by far the most important single correspondence in the language.

The achievement was certainly greater than the man. Walpole, in

fact, was not great at all; though it would be a mistake to suppose that he was the fluttering popinjay of Macaulay's picture. He had great ability and great industry. Though it amused him to pose as a mere fine gentleman, he was in reality also a learned antiquary and a shrewd politician; in the history of taste he is remarkable as one of the originators of the Gothic revival; as a writer, apart from his letters, he is important as the author of a series of memoirs which are both intrinsically interesting and of high value as historical material. Personally, he was, of course, affected and foppish in a variety of ways; he had the narrowness and the self-complacency of an aristocrat; but he also had an aristocrat's distinction and reserve; he could be affectionate in spite of his politeness, and toward the end of his life, in his relations with Miss Berry, he showed himself capable of deep feeling. Nevertheless, compare him with the master spirits of his generation, and it becomes clear at once that he was second rate. He was as far removed from the humanity of Johnson as from the passion of Burke and the intellectual grasp of Gibbon. His dealings with Chatterton were not particularly discreditable (though he lied heavily in his subsequent account of them); but, in that odd momentary concatenation, beside the mysterious and tragic figure of the 'marvelous boy,' the worldly old creature of Strawberry Hill seems to wither away into limbo.

The mediocrity of the man has sometimes

by Macaulay among othersbeen actually suggested as the cause of the excellence of his letters. But this will not do. There is no necessary connection between second-rateness and good letter writing. The correspondences of Voltaire and of Keats to take two extremely dissimilar examples show that it is possible to

write magnificent letters, and also to be a man of genius. Perhaps the really essential element in the letter writer's make-up is a certain strain of femininity. The unmixed male-the great man of action, the solid statesman does not express himself happily on those little bits of paper that go by the post. The medium is unsuitable. Nobody ever could have expected to get a good letter from Sir Robert Peel. It is true that the Duke of Wellington wrote very good letters; but the Duke, who was an exception to all rules, holds a peculiar place in the craft: he reminds one in his letters of a music-hall comedian who has evolved a single inimitable trick, which has become his very own, which is invariably produced, and as invariably goes down. The female element is obvious in Cicero, the father

or should we say the mother? — of the familiar letter. Among English writers, Swift and Carlyle, both of whom were anxious to be masculine, are disappointing correspondents: Swift's letters are too dry (a bad fault), and Carlyle's are too long (an even worse one). Gray and Cowper, on the other hand, in both of whom many of the qualities of the gentler sex are visible, wrote letters which reached perfection; and in the curious composition of Gibbon (whose admirable correspondence is perhaps less read than it deserves) there was decidedly a touch of the she-cat, the naughty old maid. In Walpole himself it is easy to perceive at once the sinuosity and grace of a fine lady, the pettishness of a dowager, the love of trifles of a maiden aunt, and even, at moments, the sensitiveness of a girl.

Another quality is perhaps equally important: the great letter writer must be an egotist. Only those who are extremely interested in themselves possess the overwhelming pertinacity of the born correspondent. No good letter

was ever written to convey information, or to please its recipient: it may achieve both those results incidentally; but its fundamental purpose is to express the personality of the writer. This is true of love letters no less than of others. A desperate egotism burns through the passionate pages of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse; and it is easy to see, in spite of her adoring protestations, that there was one person in the world more interesting to Madame de Sévigné than Madame de Grignan. Walpole's letters, with all their variety of appeal, are certainly a case in point. They may be read for many reasons; but the final, the attaching reason is the revelation which they contain of a human being. It is, indeed, a revelation of a curious kindan uncertain, ambiguous revelation,

shifty, deceptive, forever incomplete. And there the fascination lies. As one reads, the queer man gets hold of one; one reads on one cannot help it; the long, alembicated sentences, the jauntiness, the elegance, the faint disdain-one grows familiar with it all -and the glitter of the eyes through the mask. But it is impossible to stop: perhaps, just once-who knows? when no one else is looking, the mask may be lifted; or there may be another, a subtler, change in the turn of the speech. Until at last one comes to feel that one knows that long-vanished vision as well as a living friend — one of those enigmatical friends about whom one is perpetually in doubt as to whether, in spite of everything, one does know them at all.

The Athenæum

The Saturday Review