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