hich gains most, if
the paradox may be allowed, by being artless. The carefully studied
epistle, written with a view to publication, may have its value, but it
cannot have the charm of a letter written in the familiar intercourse of
friendship. It is the correspondence prompted by the heart which reaches
the heart of the reader. The humour, the gaiety, the tenderness, and the
chatty details that make a letter attractive, should be prompted by the
feelings and events of the hour. Carefully constructed sentences and
rhetorical flourishes ring hollow; to write for effect is to write
badly, and to make a display of knowledge is to reveal an ignorance of
the art.

For letter writing, although the most natural of literary gifts, is not
wholly due to nature. It is the outcome of many qualities which need
cultivation; the soil that produces such fruit must have been carefully
tilled. In our day epistolary correspondence has been in great measure
destroyed by the penny post and by rapidity of communication. In the
last century postage was costly: and although the burden was frequently
and unjustly lightened by franks, the transmission of letters was slow
and uncertain. Letters, therefore, were seldom written unless the writer
had something definite to say, and had leisure in which to say it. Much
time was spent in the occupation, letters were carefully preserved as
family heirlooms, and thus it has come to pass that much of our
knowledge of the age, and very much of the pleasure to be gained from a
study of the period, is due to its letter writers. The list of them is a
striking one, for it includes the names of Swift and Steele, of Pope and
Gay, of Bolingbroke and Chesterfield, of Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Thrale,
and of the three gifted rivals in the art, Gray, Horace Walpole, and
Cowper.

In the band of authors famous for their correspondence, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu holds a conspicuous place. Reference has been already
made to the Pope correspondence, large in bulk and large too in
interest. To this Lady Mary contributed slightly, and the greater
portion of her letters were addressed to her husband, to her sister,
Lady Mar, and to her daughter, the Countess of Bute. She was shrewd
enough to know their value: 'Keep my letters,' she wrote, 'they will be
as good as Madame de Sevigne's forty years hence;' and they are,
perhaps, as good as letters can be which are written with a sense of
their value, which Madame de Sevigne's were