that word is
heard--the more it gives way to "book"-talk--the worse. Indeed this is
not likely to be denied, though there remain as usual almost infinite
possibilities of differences in personal opinion as to what constitutes
the desirable mixture of variation and similarity between a conversation
and a letter. Let us, before discussing this or saying anything more
about the principles, say something about the history of this, at best
so delightful, at worst so undelightful art. For if History, in the
transferred sense of particular books called "histories," is rather apt
to be false: nothing but History in the wider and higher sense will ever
lead us to truth. The Future is unknown and unknowable. The Present is
turning to Past even as we are trying to know it. Only the Past itself
abides our knowledge.

[Sidenote: BIBLICAL EXAMPLES]

Of the oldest existing examples of epistolary correspondence, except
those contained in the Bible, the present writer knows little or
nothing. For, except a vanished smattering of Hebrew, he "has" no
Oriental tongue; he has never been much addicted to reading
translations, and even if he had been so has had little occasion to draw
him to such studies, and much to draw him away from them. There
certainly appear to be some beautiful specimens of the more passionate
letter writing in ancient if not exactly pre-Christian Chinese, and
probably in other tongues--but it is ill talking of what one does not
know. In the Scriptures themselves letters do not come early, and the
"token" period probably lasted long. Isaac does not even send a token
with Jacob to validate his suit for a daughter of Laban. But one would
have enjoyed a letter from Ishmael to his half-brother, when his
daughter was married to Esau, who was so much more like a son of Ishmael
himself than of the amiable husband of Rebekah. She, by the way, had
herself been fetched in an equally unlettered transaction. It would of
course be impossible, and might be regarded as improper, to devote much
space here to the sacred epistolographers. But one may wonder whether
many people have appreciated the humour of the two epistles of the great
King Ahasuerus-Artaxerxes, the first commanding and the second
countermanding the massacre of the Jews--epistles contained in the
Septuagint "Rest of the Book of Esther" (see our Apocrypha), instead of
the mere dry summaries which had sufficed for "the Hebrew and the
Chaldee." The exact authenticity o