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long chatty letters of the eighteenth century purely
delightful. I do not care much for Lord Chesterfield's correspondence;
he was eternally posing with an eye on the future--perhaps on the very
immediate future. As Johnson sternly said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as
a dancing-master might write," and he spoke the truth. Fancy a man
sending such stuff as this to a raw boy--"You will observe the manners
of the people of the best fashion there; not that they are--it may be--the
best manners in the world, but because they are the best manners of the
place where you are, to which a man of sense always conforms. The
nature of things is always and everywhere the same; but the modes of
them vary more or less in every country, and an easy and genteel
conformity to them, or rather the assuming of them at proper times and
proper places, is what particularly constitutes a man of the world, and a
well-bred man!" All true enough, but how shallow, and how ineffably
conceited! Here is another absurd fragment--"My dear boy, let us

resume our reflections upon men, their character, their manners--in a
word, our reflections upon the World." It is quite like Mr. Pecksniff's
finest vein. There is not a touch of nature or vital truth in the
Chesterfield letters, and the most that can be said of them is that they
are the work of a fairly clever man who was flattered until he lost all
sense of his real size. If we take the whole bunch of finikin sermons
and compare them with the one tremendous knock-down letter which
Johnson sent to the dandy earl, we can easily see who was the Man of
the pair. When we return to Walpole, the case is different. Horace never
posed at all; he was a natural gentleman, and anything like want of
simplicity was odious to him. The age lives in his charming letters;
after going through them we feel as though we had been on familiar
terms with that wicked, corrupt, outwardly delightful society that
gambled and drank, and scandalised the grave spirits of the nation, in
the days when George III. was young. Horace Walpole was the
letter-writer of letter-writers; his gossip carries the impress of truth with
it; and, though he had no style, no brilliancy, no very superior ability,
yet, by using his faculties in a natural way, he was able to supply
material for two of the finest literary fragments of modern times. I take
it that the most stirring and profoundly wise piece of modern history is
Carlyle's brief account of William Pitt, given in the "Life of Frederick
the Great." Once we have read it we feel as though the great commoner
had stood before us for a while under a searching light; his figure is
imprinted on the very nerves, and no man who has read carefully can
ever shake off an impression that seems burnt into the fibre of the mind.
This superlatively fine historic portrait was painted by Carlyle solely
from Walpole's material--for we cannot reckon chance newspaper
scraps as counting for much--and thus the gossip of Strawberry Hill
conferred immortality on himself and on our own Titanic statesman.
But Walpole's influence did not end there. Whoever wants to read a
very good and charming work should not miss seeing Sir George
Trevelyan's "Life of Charles James Fox." To praise this book is almost
an impertinence. I content myself with saying that those who once taste
its fascination go back to it again and again, and usually end by placing
it with the books that are "the bosom friends" of men. Now the grim
Scotchman lit up Horace's letters with the lurid furnace-glow of his
genius; Sir George held the serene lamp of the scholar above the same

letters, and lo, we have two pieces that can only die when the language
dies! What a feat for a mere letter-writer to achieve! Let ambitious
correspondents take example by Horace Walpole, and learn that
simplicity is the first, best--nay, the only--object to be aimed at by the
letter-writer.
We have forgotten the easy style of Walpole; we do not any longer care
much for Johnson, though his letters are indeed models; we have no
time for lovely whimsical elaborations like those of Cowper or Charles
Lamb; but still some of us--persons of inferior mind perhaps--do
attempt to write letters. To these I have a word to say. So far as I can
judge, after passing many, many hundreds and thousands of letters
through my hands, the best correspondents nowadays are either those
who have been educated to the finest point, and who therefore dare not
be affected, or those who have no education at all. A little while ago I
went through a terrific letter