far if at all below the three men
just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more
remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the
letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this
time is not really more important than the abundance, variety and
popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the
"letterwritingest" of ages from almost every point of view. In its least
as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if not into
poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on classical
models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more
modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_, started the
fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of
print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's
good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like
Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian
times, if then. At the present moment one does not remember an exact
equivalent in England to the story of two good writers in French if not
French writers[8] living in the same house, meeting constantly during
the day, yet exchanging letters, and not short ones, before breakfast.
But very likely there is or was one, and more than one.

For those no doubt estimable persons who are not content with facts but
must have some explanations of them, it is less difficult to supply such
things than is sometimes the case. One--the attainment at last of a
"middle" style neither grand nor vulgar--has already been glanced at. It
has been often and quite truly observed that there are sentences,
passages, paragraphs, almost whole letters in Horace Walpole and Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, in Fanny Burney and in Cowper, which no one would
think old-fashioned at the present day in any context where modern slang
did not suggest itself as natural. But this was by no means the only
predisposing cause, though perhaps most of the others were, in this way
or that, connected with it. Both in France and in England literature
and social matters generally were in something like what political
economists call "the stationary state" till (as rather frequently
happens with such apparently stationary states) the smoothness changed