doubted whether even "these" had
exactly "endured it"--that is to say, whether the expected salt of the
author of so much published _persiflage_ had not been left out or had
singularly lost its savour. To take another from the next generation, it
is pretty certain that Mr. Swinburne's letters, though we have judicious
selections from them, must have needed much more excision or
retrenchment than Mr. Arnold's, unless he wrote them in a manner
remarkably different both from his conversation and from his published
works. In such cases it is best, the evidence being not fully before us,
not to anticipate either the privileges or the decisions of posterity.

VI

SOME SPECIAL KINDS OF LETTER

A few more general remarks, however, on _kinds_ of letter-writing--as
distinguished from personality and accomplishment of letter-writers--may
not improperly be added.

[Sidenote: LETTERS AND THE NOVEL]

One extremely curious application of the Letter has not yet been
noticed, except by a glance or two: and that is the way in which--when
after birth-struggles for some two thousand years the novel at last got
itself born--letter-writing was pressed into its service. Historically,
as was briefly indicated near the beginning of this, one may connect
Greek Rhetoric and Greek Romance, and suggest the connection as the
origin of the "novel-in-letters." In the romance proper--that is to say
that of the Middle Ages--letters do not play any very important part,
just as they played none in life. But in the "Heroic" variety of the
late sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth centuries they play a
much larger--partly no doubt because of the influence (here noted) of
the Greek Romance itself, but more because of the increased frequency
and importance of actual correspondence in life and society. We need
not, however, attribute too much to this influence of imitation in
seeking for the cause or causes which made Richardson adopt the form:
nor need we even put down to Richardson's own popularity, abroad as well
as at home, the very general further adoption and continuance of a form
which has perhaps more to be said against it than for it. Most serious
students of the history of prose fiction must have noticed, and some of
them have already pointed out, the curious, rather naif, but quite
obvious feeling on the part of the earlier practitioners of such fiction
that somebody might ask them, in more polite language than that in which
Card