nication.

Women write the best letters, and get the best letters written to them:
but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class
and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima,[5] ever
wrote at all. The Romans, after their early period, were not merely a
larger and ever larger community full of the most various business, and
constantly extending their presence and their sway; but, by their unique
faculty of organisation, they put every part of their huge world in
communication with every other part. Here also we lack women's letters;
but we are, as above remarked, by no means badly off for those of men.
There have even been some audacious heretics who have preferred Cicero's
letters to his speeches and treatises; Seneca, the least attractive of
those before mentioned, put well what the poet Wordsworth called in his
own poems "extremely va_loo_able thoughts"; one of the keenest of
mathematicians and best of academic and general business men known to
the present writer, the late Professor Chrystal of Edinburgh, made a
special favourite of Pliny; and if people can find nothing worse to say
against Sidonius than that he wrote in contemporary, and not in what was
for his time archaic, Latin, his case will not look bad in the eyes of
sensible men.

[Sidenote: SIDONIUS]

Sidonius, like Synesius, was a Christian, and, though the observation
may seem no more logical than Fluellen's about Macedon and Monmouth,
besides being in more doubtful taste, there would seem to be some
connection between the spread of Christianity and that of
letter-writing. At any rate they synchronise, despite or perhaps because
of the deficiency of formal literature during the "Dark" Ages. It is not
really futile to point out that a very large part of the New Testament
consists of "Epistles," and that by no means the whole of these epistles
is occupied by doctrinal or hortatory matter. Even that which is so,
often if not always, partakes of the character of a "live" letter to an
extent which makes the so-called letters of the Greek Rhetoricians mere
school exercises. And St. Paul's allusions to his journeys, his
salutations, his acknowledgment of presents, his reference to the cloak
and the books with its anxious "but especially the parchments," and his
excellent advice to Timothy about beverages, are all the purest and most
genuine matter for mail-bags. So is St. Peter's very gentleman-like (as
it has been te