lmost everything--throw themselves into the
letter form. To come back to that with which we began there is no doubt
that the eighteenth century is the century of the letter with us.

IV

NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. EARLY

[Sidenote: EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY GROUPS]

There is, however, not the slightest intention of suggesting here that
the art of letter-writing died with the century in which it flourished
so greatly. In the first place, periods of literary art seldom or never
"die" in a moment like a tropical sunset; and, in the second, the notion
that centennial years necessarily divide such periods, as well as the
centuries in which they appear, is an unhistorical delusion. There have
been dates in our history--1400 was one of them--where something of the
kind seems to have happened: but they are very rare. Most ships of
literature at such times are fortunately what is called in actual ships
"clinker-built"--that is to say overlappingly--and except at 1600 this
has never been so much the case as two hundred years later and one
hundred ago. When the eighteenth century closed, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Scott and Southey were men approaching more or less closely, thirty
years of age. Landor, Hazlitt, Lamb and Moore were at least, and some of
them well, past the conventional "coming of age"; De Quincey, Byron and
Shelley were boys and even Keats was more than an infant. In the first
mentioned of these groups there was still very marked eighteenth-century
idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from
Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Shelley
and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two
individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns
letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer,
and nobody who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so.
The first requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"--in a rather
peculiar sense of that word, closest to the way in which it has been
employed by some religious sects. Wordsworth could _preach_--nearly
always in a manner deserving respect and sometimes in one commanding
almost infinite admiration; but when the letter-writer begins to preach
he is in danger of the waste-paper basket or the fire. Coleridge's
letters are fairly numerous and sometimes very good: but more than one
of his weaknesses appears in them.

The excellence of Scott's, though always discover