times when great historical events are passing before our eyes, the
journalist is to future historians what the African traveller is to the
map-makers. His work is neither complete nor orderly, but it is the
fresh record of an eye-witness, and enables us to become ourselves
spectators of the mighty drama of the world. Never was this service so
well rendered as it is now, by correspondents who achieve heroic feats
of bodily and mental prowess, exposing themselves to the greatest
dangers, and writing much and well in circumstances the most unfavorable
to literary composition. How vividly the English war correspondents
brought before us the reality of the great conflict between Germany and
France! What a romantic achievement, worthy to be sung in heroic verse,
was the finding of Livingstone by Stanley! Not less interesting have
been the admirable series of letters by M. Erdan in the _Temps_, in
which, with the firmness of a master-hand, he has painted from the life,
week after week, year after year, the decline and fall of the temporal
power of the Papacy. I cannot think that any page of Roman history is
better worth reading than his letters, more interesting, instructive,
lively, or authentic. Yet with your contempt for newspapers you would
lose all this profitable entertainment, and seek instead of it the
accounts of former epochs not half so interesting as this fall of the
temporal power, accounts written in most cases by men in libraries who
had not seen the sovereigns they wrote about, nor talked with the people
whose condition they attempted to describe. You have a respect for these
accounts because they are printed in books, and bound in leather, and
entitled "history," whilst you despise the direct observation of a man
like Erdan, because he is only a journalist, and his letters are
published in a newspaper. Is there not some touch of prejudice in this,
some mistake, some narrowness of intellectual aristocracy?

LETTER IX.

TO AN AUTHOR WHO APPRECIATED CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

Miss Mitford on the selfishness of authors--A suggestion of
Emerson's--A laconic rule of his--Traces of jealousy--And of a more
subtle feeling--A contradiction--Necessary to resist the invasion of
the present--A certain equilibrium--The opposite of a pedant--The best
classics not pedants, but artists.

Reading the other day a letter by Miss Mitford, I was reminded of you as
the eye is reminded of green when it sees scarlet. Y