t more as a
duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
Buckinghamshire village:

'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'

If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
been published upon their own intrinsic merits.

Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
is, in our judgment, an ope