seldom so pre-eminent
as an illustration of the epistolary ideal--"writing as you would
talk"--that it would be absurd to say nothing about it in this
Introduction, and that it may even be possible to give some examples of
it--one such of Swift's must be given--in the text. Of those which, as
it was said of one famous group (those of Mlle. de Lespinasse) "burn the
paper," those of which the Abelard and Heloise collection, with those of
"The Portuguese Nun," Maria Alcoforado, and Julie de Lespinasse herself
are the most universally famous--we have two pretty recent collections
in English from two of the greatest poets and one of the greatest
poetesses in English of the nineteenth century. They are the letters,
referred to above, of Keats to Fanny Brawne, and those of the Brownings
to each other.

There are, it is to be hoped, few people who read such letters (unless
they are of such a date that Time has exercised his strange power of
resanctifying desecration and making private property public) without an
unpleasant consciousness of eavesdropping. But there is another class
which is not exposed to any such disagreeable liability: and that is the
very large proportion of love-letters where the amativeness is, so to
speak, more or less concealed, or where, though scarcely covered with
the thinnest veil, it is mixed with jest sometimes, jest rather on the
wrong side of the mouth, perhaps, but jest exercising its usual power of
embalming. (Salt and sugar both preserve: but in this particular
instance the danger is of oversweetness already.) There can--or perhaps
we should say there could, but for some differences of opinion worth
attending to--be no doubt that Swift owes much to this mixture: and if
anybody ever undertook a large collection of the best private
love-letters he would probably find the same seasoning in the best of
them. For examples in which the actual amatory element is present but as
it were under-current, like blood that flushes a cheek but does not
show outside it, some of the best examples are those of Scott to Lady
Abercorn. Those recently published, and already glanced at, of Disraeli
to various ladies would seem to be more demonstrative and more
histrionic. But the section as admitted lies, for us, on the extreme
border of our province. It is too important to be wholly omitted and
therefore these paragraphs have been given to it. And it may require
future touching in reference to some particular writer