keray letters, but a considerably larger one than has ever appeared
even in extracts and catalogues. It will be an addition to our
Epistolary Library which can bear comparison with any previous occupant
of those shelves: and one of the books which deserve, in a very peculiar
sense, the hackneyed praise of being "as good as a novel." For it will
be almost the equivalent of an additional novel of its author's own--a
_William Makepeace Thackeray_ in the familiar novel-form of title, and
in the old Richardsonian form of contents--but oh! how different from
anything of Richardson's save that it might possibly make you hang
yourself, not because you could not get to the story, but because you
had come to the end of it.

[Sidenote: FITZGERALD]

If, however, anyone insists on a formal and more or less complete
presentation, already existing, of nineteenth century "Letters" in a
body by a single writer, the palm must probably be given to those
(already referred to) of the translator or paraphrast of Omar Khayyam.
Besides their great intrinsic interest and peculiar idiosyncrasy, they
have, for anyone studying the subject as we are endeavouring to do, a
curious attraction of comparison. Letter-writing, though by no means
exclusively, would appear to be specially and peculiarly the _forte_ of
men who live somewhat special and peculiar lives--men without the
ordinary family ties of wife and children--sometimes though by no means
always, recluses; possibly to some extent "originals," "humourists,"
"eccentrics," as they have been called at different times and from
different points of view. Even Walpole, fond as he was of society,
belongs to the class after a fashion, as do also Chesterfield[36] and
Lady Mary, while Gray, Cowper, and at a later period Lamb, are eminently
of it. But hardly anyone so unquestionably comes under the
classification as Edward FitzGerald. He certainly was for a time
married, but that marriage as certainly was not made in Heaven, if it
was not conspicuously of the other origin: and actual cohabitation
lasted but a short time. He had no children, and though he frequently
foregathered with the family from which he sprang, he was essentially a
"solitary." Such solitaries, even if they do not ticket and advertise
themselves as such after the fashion of Rousseau and Senancour and the
author of _Jacopo Ortis_, naturally enough find in letters the outlet
for communication with their fellows[37] which others find in