Even then that Sage's transient thought To feel them mock our honest pride, Never again to know th' intense "No letters there!-not even the small A pleasant thing it is a good sight for sore eyne, a balmy boon for sore heart-to break the seal, and devour the contents, of some true-hearted friend's true-worded letter, be it, to use Southey's sexual distinction, He-pistle or She-pistle. "A letter," observes the author of that distinction-to which, however, Byron had approximated in a line recently quoted-"a letter is like a fresh billet of wood upon the fire, which, if it be not needed for immediate warmth, is always agreeable for its exhilarating effects." "Ecrivez-moi de temps en temps," begs the Cardinal de Bernis of Voltaire: "une lettre de vous embellit toute la journée, et je connais le prix d'un jour." "This moment," writes little, fluttering, flattering Fanny Burney to the Lady of Streatham, "have two sweet and most kind letters from my best-beloved Mrs. Thrale made amends for but no little anxiety which her fancied silence had given me. I know not what is now come to this post; but there is nothing I can bear with so little patience as being tricked out of any of your letters. They do, indeed, give me more delight than I can express and the puss adds her entire conviction that they are indeed the perfection of epistolary writing, for, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, all that is not kindness in them is wit, and all that is not wit is kindness. It was in Dr. Johnson's last hours that he said, while opening a note which his servant brought to him: "An odd thought strikes ine; we shall receive no letters in the grave." A latter-day minstrel has found consolation in the thought-but the strain he strikes is in a morbid mood: "Yes-'mid the unutterable dread While all is hurry, doubt, dismay, Rose-scented one that dared not come no, we must not quote Mr. Simmons' stanzas entire, and so we elect a couleur de rose sort of finale in the instance of the "small rose-scented " billet that came stealing and wafting odors on the zephyrs of evening. Some pathetic lines might be indited, bythe-by, on the afflictions it sometimes costs frail flesh and blood to write a letter, even to a faithful friend. Aversion from letterwriting is, with some, a constitutional infirmity. The malady attacks them in acute form, and anon becomes chronic. M. Fauriel, one of his biographers tells us, "était plus prompt à servir ses amis qu'à leur écrire;" though when M. Fauriel could induce himself to write, the result is indicated in what Madame de Staël says, in a letter from her involuntary seclusion at Coppet, full of questions about her too indispensable Paris: "Je vous importune de questions, mais les solitaires sont tréscurieux; et vous, quoiquo habitant de la ville, vous écrivez de longues et de jolies lettres." Often it is those who can write the longest and prettiest possible letters, not begun to rise, and the mark in question was the à quo, not the ad quem. It is well for those of us who prize him as the prince of letter-writers in his peculiar genre, that Horace was fibbing right and left when he pretended to hate letter-writing. But for his letters, what would he be to this generation? With them, he is an authority with all authorities, the observed of all observers of the politics and personalities of the eighteenth century. that are least disposed to exhibit their talent | magnificent stock to dispose of. I can only that way. Boileau designates Madame de la say, that, age has already an effect on the Fayette as "la femme de France qui avait vigor of my pen; none on yours: it is not, le plus d'esprit et qui écrivait le mieux; "I assure you, for you alone, but my ink is at yet cette personne has the repute of haissant low-water-mark for all my acquaintance." surtout d'écrire des lettres, insomuch that Horace Walpole's ink at low-water-mark in only a very few, and they very brief, of her the '45! If so, it was only because it had epistles or notelets survive: "c'est dans celles de Madame de Sévigné plutôt que dans les siennes qu'on la peut connaître." Madame de Sévigné's daughter seems to have disrelished the part, that is to say no part, or next to none, played by La Fayette in the performance: "Voyez, voyez ! votre Madame de la Fayette vous aime-t-elle donc si extraordinairement? elle ne vous écrirait pas deux lignes en dix ans ; elle sait faire ce qui l'accommode, elle garde ses aises et son repos," and Gourville is reported to have written on the same sore subject in the same strain, only plus malicieux. Madame de la Fayette's declaration is well known: "Si j'avais un amant qui voulût de mes lettres tous les matins, je romprais avec lui." Sentimental fair ones, who indulge in a plurality of sheets (crossed) and an indefinite series of postscripts, may object, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Others of a more restrained habit will perhaps undertake to vouch for her, Probably, however, the correspondence of every man and woman of note would furnish proof, if searched into,. of frequent if not permanent distaste for letter-writing. Gleim, good old father Gleim, was a rara avis, a strange old bird, in the mania that possessed him for writing and being written to. Some of his juniors will account him to have been a 66 very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upwards"-for to those years he attained-when he indulged so profusely in epistles to people he scolded for being less liberal in their replies. William Taylor's Nay, but she'll keep her word!" description of Gleim is, that he had a loving We find even Madame d'Arblay seized by a heart, a house always open to literary guests, lasting fit of what she calls "writing- and a passion for corresponding with all his weariness," and pressing on one remonstrant acquaintance, especially with young men the forbearance in general of her other of letters in whom he anticipated rising friends, who, she says, when they understood genius. "His scrutoire has been edited; that writing was utterly irksome to her, except as a mere vehicle to prevent uneasiness on their part, and to obtain intelligence on hers, concurred not to make her silence still more oppressive to her than her writing, by a kind reception of a few words, and giving her back letters for notes. Horace Walpole soothes his conscience by the persuasion that letter-writing is one of the first duties that the very best people let perish out of their rubric; and, so early as 1744, avows that every day grows to make him hate writing more. In 1745 he asks Sir Horace Mann, of all loves, "How do you contrive to roll out your patience into two sheets? You certainly don't love me better than I do you; and yet if our loves were to be sold by the quire, you would have by far the more and it abounds with complaints that his friends are less fond of writing useless epistles than himself, and were one by one letting drop an intercourse, which amused his leisure, but interrupted their industry." The German Anacreon became de trop with his exactions on his friends; "Poor Anacreon, thou grow'st old," they might say; and treat him accordingly. Southey, in one of his early letters, attributes to "those intervals of vacancy which must occur in the best directed solitude," what he calls "the epistolary mania in very young persons. This was my own case once," he adds: "I wrote not from a fulness of matter to communicate, but from sheer emptinessday after day-foolscap sheets, and close writing, for three pages, and the top and bottom of the fourth. More knowledge, and are not, by dozens probably, the only "paperthe daily increasing consciousness of how sparing" correspondents on record.) And much yet remains to be learnt, more em- Sydney Smith writes to "Dear Mrs. Crowe, ployments, and marriage, have long since I quite agree with you as to the horrors of cured me. My pleasure now consists in correspondence. Correspondences are like receiving letters, not in writing them." Mr. small clothes before the invention of susDisraeli's Contarini Fleming is, indeed, only penders; it is impossible to keep them up." a type of youthful passion for letter-writing, Not altogether a lady's simile, or in severe at that stage of the young German's college clerical keeping; but Sydney Smith knew life when he inundated Musæus with floods what he was about when simile-making, of penmanship daily: "But the letters with and was a clergy-man and lady's man too. which I overwhelmed him-these were the If that of the suspenders is not very like the most violent infliction-what pages of mad broad cloth without, 'tis marvellously like eloquence!-solemn appeals, bitter sarcasms, the broad man within, whose breadth of infinite ebullitions of frantic sensibility. For drollery few can resist and nobody can deny. the first time in my life I composed. I grow Looking over an accumulation of old letintoxicated with my own eloquence.". Most ters-what a strange mixture of feelings that of us, in some degree or other, have been induces-heart-sickness too often predomi"overtaken" by this intoxication, for at nant as one sighs "Ah, for the change 'twixt least once in a way, in our time-though now and then!" The author of "Michael (perhaps, and well-a-day!) long, long since de Mas" touchingly depictures the world..That time is past; hardened Gold-Finder examining a collection of these saddening memorials: And all its aching joys are now no more, "He opened it, and face to face arose The dead old years he thought to have es- All chronicled in letters; there he saw There are no hours so full of speechless woe Letters from those who loved us once; of whom Some have long ceased to love at all-the hand That traced the fond warm records still and cold As surely, on the other hand, we have come, at a later day, to know what it is to shrink from a plurality of sheets, and a change of pens, and an extra outlay in postage stamps, when pursuing this once-cherished occupation-when fulfilling as a duty what was, of yore, an overmastering passion. Every one must have experienced, who has lived long enough, something of the feeling which Charles Lamb humorously expresses when he says, that a philosophical treatise is wanting of the causes of the backwardness with which persons, after a certain time of life, set about writing a letter. always feel as if I had nothing to say, and the performance generally justifies the presentiment." In the same epistle occurs the memorable avowal: "A full pause here And some, O! sadder that, by us estranged, comes upon me as if I had not a word more Still live, still love, but live for us no more.' left I will shake my brain. Once! twice! I have a little packet," says the author of -nothing comes up. George Fox recom- "Dream-Life," not very large, tied up mends waiting on these occasions. I wait. with narrow crimson ribbon, now soiled Nothing comes. "Professor Wilson with frequent handling, which, far into told me," says Mr. Samuel Warren, "that some winter's night, I take down from its there were two things he specially hated," nook upon my shelf, and untie, and open, of which, letter-writing was the first. ("As and run over with such sorrow and such joy, for letter-writing," adds the Queen's Counsel, "I never received from him but one in my life; and that was written on half a sheet of paper, evidently the blank sheet of some old letter." Pope and Madame d'Arblay The spirit that turned to ours, long lost to all That moves, and mourns, and sins upon the earth; such tears and such smiles, as I am sure make me for weeks after a kinder and better man. There are in this little packet letters in the familiar hand of a mother. What gentle admonition!-what tender affection! God have mercy on him who outlives the We must conclude. Yet not with tho tears that such admonitions and such affec- writing of the dead? With a fragment, tion call up to the eye! There are others then, not savoring of mortality, but suffiin the budget, in the delicate and unformed ciently in tone with the penseroso in these hand of a loved and lost sister-written latter extracts: it shall be one of Mrs. when she and you were full of glee, and the Browning's beautifully rendered Sonnets best mirth of youthfulness. Does it harm from the Portuguese-a story in itself, you to recall that mirthfulness? or to trace though one of a series: again, for the hundredth time, that scrawl-6 ing postscript at the bottom, with its i's so carefully dotted, and its gigantie t's so carefully crossed, by the childish hand of a little brother?" Well says Sir Bulwer Lytton, in his last, best novel,-"My Novol" he rightly dubbed it, kar' eloxmu,-that a thought written in warm, sunny life, and then suddenly rising up to us, when the hand that traced, and the heart that cherished it, are dust-is verily as a ghost. "It is a likeness struck off the fond human being, and surviving it. Far more truthful than bust or portrait, it bids us see the tear flow, and the pulse beat. What ghost can the churchyard yield to us like the writing of the dead?" My letters! all dead paper. . . . mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering And let them drop down on my knee to-night. sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring Yet I wept for it !-this,-the paper's light- quailed As if God's future thundered on my past: paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast : availed, If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!" is very interesting; and, at the same time, there is something very melancholy in reading through a series of the most unreserved letters, beginning with the hopes and projects of early life, relating in their progress the joys and sorrows which flesh is heir to, and concluding by a few lines in a different hand, and on a black-edged paper, announcing the death of the person with whose concerns, from manhood to old age, I had become thus intimately acquainted." Southey thus writes to his son-in-law, after going through the papers and letters of the late Dr. Bell, with a view to publication: "As you may suppose, these papers contain much of the romance of real life; and a full share of its tragedy. It is an affecting thing to read continuously through an unreserved correspondence of twenty, thirty, or forty years, ending with a black-bordered And again, to Mrs. Hughes (June 16, 1833): These feelings are brought home to announcement of the writer's death; affect-me by the perusal of poor Dr. Bell's papers, to which I daily devote two hours before breakfast. for nearly fifty years, and much of it I have found He had preserved the whole of his correspondence very interesting. Commencing with the formation of his friendship in India, relating the prospects, hopes, fears, and fortunes of his friends from that time, till a different handwriting and a black seal concludes the series." ing it would be in a book, still more so in the letters themselves the very letters which have been written and received with such emotions of pleasure and of grief." *Southey appears to have been deeply impressed with this consideration in the instance of Dr. Bell's letters of a lifetime. He recurs to it again and again, with other of his correspondents. Thus to Mrs. Bray of Tavistock: Mr. Cuthbert Southey and Mr. Wood Warter must each have been feelingly alive to this reflection, in editing for the press the some time Lau "There is a vast mass: in fact the whole corre-reate's own correspondence. spondence of more than fifty years. Much of this From Chambers' Journal. MR. THACKERAY ON THE FOUR GEORGES. to relent towards gentle women and innocent children, and all who love and cherish them. George I., who came to the British throne THE success of Mr. Thackeray, in his lec- at fifty-four, is sketched as a coarse proflitures on the Humorous Writers of England, gate, whom England was glad to accept, has very naturally led to his preparing a with all his mistresses, as a political conseries on the first British sovereigns of the venience, and to make the best of. We Houso of Hanover, which, after delivering must pass from him to come to his son, the them with great approbation, and we trust second George, who commenced his reign by. profit, in America, he is now beginning to burning his father's will," under the astonbring before home audiences. He com- ished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury." menced with Edinburgh and Glasgow in the This was also a prince of low tastes and course of the past month, addressing in each habits. His court was scarcely an improvecase multitudes to be numbered, not by hun- ment upon that of Charles II. He had only dreds, but by thousands. It was verily a the good sense to leave the government to remarkable sight. In the huge Music Hall Sir Robert Walpole, who, with gross vices of the Scottish capital is seen an acre-breadth and faults, gave England peace for thirty of the human face divine-the intelligent years, and kept the funds at par. Dull and countenances of the middle and upper classes dissolute as the king was, he had the one of a city noted for its cultivation of litera- good quality of bravery. When Prince ture and science. In the front of a great Charles Stuart was at Derby, and many orchestra appears the lecturer, flanked with were looking grave, the royal countenance judges, clergymen, professors, authors, magis- never changed for a moment. [Perhaps, as trates, and distinguished citizens, and backed Mr. Thackeray admires bravery, reconsidby a mass of people rising to the very ceil-eration might lead him to expunge the ing. A tall and bulky man of five-and- phrase "that scamp," as applied to the forty, with bushy hair nearly white, surmounting a set of manly but pallid features, begins to speak, and for an hour perfect silence awaits his voice, as he reads, with varying tones, from the paper lying on the desk before him. What a compliment to a cinating. Indeed, he wrote sentimental British author, this vast, and in some re-letters of thirty pages from Germany to the spects brilliant gathering, drawn at once by interest about his person, and expectation of the intellectual treat he is to give them! Surely it cannot now be said that an author is of little account among us. Where are the men who get higher compliments paid them? In each of his four lectures, Mr. Thackeray dispatches a George, not detailing his history, but sketching his personal character, his way of life, and surroundings, all in language the most pithy and epigrammatic that can be conceived. The general strain is satiric. In his hands, the courtliness which formed the atmosphere of the monarch in his lifetime is revenged. A century in which sovereigns and oligarchies were every thing and the people nothing, is tried in the balance and found wanting. Every here and there, however, the stern moralist lapses into those tendernesses which form so prominent a beauty in his novels. He never fails prince who ventured, with 5000 half-armed Highlanders, to march so far south as Derby.] George had also some sentiment towards his queen and his German subjects. "His letters are said to have been fas queen, and from London, on his return, to the German friends he left; and, if he judged men by a low standard, a dismal experience told him he was right, and there was nothing a minister like Walpole could tell him calculated to alter this estimate. The Germans used to say of him when young: 'He is wild, but fights like a man.' So he did at Dettingen, where, like a dapper little hero, he brandished his sword in the face of the whole French army. Upon public festivals ever after, he wore the suit he had on at Dettingen, and the people-to whom such honest pride is pleasant-laughed kindly when they saw the odd old garments, for bravery is never out of fashion."* Mr. Thackeray's sketch of Queen Caroline, the one dignified figure of the court, is most charming. Wise, calm, gentle, affable *Our extracts are almost verbatim from the Edinburgh newspapers (Scotsman and Daily Express), and can only be understood as an approxi mation to the lecturer's words. |