uliar points, at least witty, if not
natural.

As we became a literary nation, familiar letters served as a vehicle for
the fresh feelings of our first authors. Howell, whose Epistolae bears his
name, takes a wider circumference in "Familiar Letters, domestic and
foreign, historical, political, and philosophical, upon emergent
occasions." The "emergent occasions" the lively writer found in his long
confinement in the Fleet--that English Parnassus! Howell is a wit, who, in
writing his own history, has written that of his times; he is one of the
few whose genius, striking in the heat of the moment only current coin,
produces finished medals for the cabinet. His letters are still published.
The taste which had now arisen for collecting letters, induced Sir Tobie
Mathews, in 1660, to form a volume, of which many, if not all, are genuine
productions of their different writers.

The dissipated elegance of Charles II. inspired freedom in letter-writing.
The royal emigrant had caught the tone of Voiture. We have some few
letters of the wits of this court, but that school of writers, having
sinned in gross materialism, the reaction produced another of a more
spiritual nature, in a romantic strain of the most refined sentiment.
Volumes succeeded volumes from pastoral and heroic minds. Katherine
Philips, in the masquerade-dress of "The Matchless Orinda," addressed Sir
Charles Cottrel, her grave "Poliarchus;" while Mrs. Behn, in her loose
dress, assuming the nymph-like form of "Astraea," pursued a gentleman,
concealed in a domino, under the name of "Lycidas."

Before our letters reached to nature and truth, they were strained by one
more effort after novelty; a new species appeared, "From the Dead to the
Living," by Mrs. Rowe: they obtained celebrity. She was the first who, to
gratify the public taste, adventured beyond the Styx; the caprice of
public favour has returned them to the place whence they came.

The letters of Pope were unquestionably written for the public eye. Partly
accident, and partly persevering ingenuity, extracted from the family
chests the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who long remained the
model of letter-writing. The letters of Hughes and Shenstone, of Gray,
Cowper, Walpole, and others, self-painters, whose indelible colours have
given an imperishable charm to these fragments of the human mind, may
close our subject; printed familiar letters now enter into the history of
our literature.