en said of Thackeray's letter-writing powers
in the Introduction that not much need be added here on the
general side. But a few words may be allowed on what we may
call the _conditioning_ circumstances which affected these
powers, and made the result so peculiar. Except in Swift's
case--a thing piquant in itself considering the injustice of
the later writer to the earlier--hardly any body of letters
exhibits these conditions so obviously and in so varied a
fashion. In both there was the utmost intellectual satire
combined with the utmost tenderness of feeling. Thackeray of
course, partly from nature and partly from the influence of
time, did not mask his tenderness and double-edge his
severity with roughness and coarseness. But the combination
was intrinsically not very different. There has also to be
taken into account in Thackeray's case domestic
sorrow--coming quickly and life-long after it began; means
long restricted (partly by his own folly but not so more
tolerable); recognition of genius almost as long deferred;
and yet other "maladies of the soul." The result was a
constant ferment, of which the letters are in a way the
relieving valve or tap. That they are often apparently
light-hearted has nothing surprising in it: for when a man
habitually "eats his heart" it naturally becomes
lighter--till there is nothing of it left.

He is, however, not easy to "sample," there being, as has
been said, no authorised collection to draw upon and other
difficulties in the way. What follows may serve for fault
of a better: and the _Spectator_ letter-pastiche referred to
above under Walpole, will complete it perhaps more
appropriately than may at first appear. For while the latter
is quite Addisonian, not merely in dress but in body, its
soul is blended of two natures--the model's and the
artist's--in the rather uncanny fashion which makes _Esmond_
as a whole so marvellous, except to those stalwarts who hold
that, as nobody before the twentieth century knew anything
about anything, Thackeray could not know about the
eighteenth.

47. TO MISS LUCY BAXTER

WASHINGTON, Saturday
Feb. 19. 1853.

My dear little kind Lucy:

I began to write you a letter in the railroad yesterday, but it bumped
with more than ordinary violence, and I was forced to