s not write to
praise. His guiding principle is the diffusion of useless knowledge,
and he demands or imparts it according to the exigencies of the hour.
It is strange that a burning thirst for information should be
combined with such reluctance to acquire it through ordinary
channels. A man who wishes to write a paper on the botanical value
of Shakespeare's plays does not dream of consulting a concordance
and a botany, and then going to work. The bald simplicity of such
a process offends his sense of magnitude. He writes to a
distinguished scholar, asking a number of burdensome questions, and
is apparently under the impression that the resources of the
scholar's mind, the fruits of boundless industry, should be
cheerfully placed at his disposal. A woman who meditates a "literary
essay" upon domestic pets is not content to track her quarry through
the long library shelves. She writes to some painstaking worker,
enquiring what English poets have "sung the praises of the cat," and
if Cowper was the only author who ever domesticated hares? One of
Huxley's most amusing letters is written in reply to a gentleman who
wished to compile an article on "Home Pets of Celebrities," and who
unhesitatingly applied for particulars concerning the Hodeslea cat.

These are, of course, labour-saving devices, but economy of effort
is not always the ambition of the correspondent. It would seem easier,
on the whole, to open a dictionary of quotations than to compose an
elaborately polite letter, requesting to know who said--

"Fate cannot harm me; I have dined to-day."

It is certainly easier, and far more agreeable, to read Charles
Lamb's essays than to ask a stranger in which one of them he
discovered the author's heterodox views on encyclopaedias. It
involves no great fatigue to look up a poem of Herrick's, or a letter
of Shelley's, or a novel of Peacock's (these things are accessible
and repay enquiry), and it would be a rational and self-respecting
thing to do, instead of endeavouring to extort information (like an
intellectual footpad) from writers who are in no way called upon to
furnish it.

One thing is sure. As long as there are people in this world whose
guiding principle is the use of other people's brains, there can be
no decline and fall of letter-writing. The correspondence which
plagued our great-grandfathers a hundred years ago, plagues their
descendants to-day. Readers of Lockhart's "Scott" will remember how
an Edi