What a difference in our enjoyment it would make, were the letters of Fanny Burney and Horace Walpole taken from us! Even Hannah More becomes entertaining; for though her circle was a narrow one, there were delightful people in it, and the letters make us at home in her little world, as no formal biography could do. Nowadays no one writes letters, and no one would have time to read them if they were written. Little notes fly back and forth, like swallows, between friend and friend, between parent and child, carrying the news of the day in small morsels easily digested; it is not worth while to tell the whole story with the pen, when it can be told in a few weeks, at the farthest, with the voice. For nobody now is more than a few weeks from anywhere. In the spring my neighbor came home with his wife from the Philippine Islands, to pass a few weeks with his friends and hers. Yesterday he ran back to the islands, to buckle to business again. Why take the trouble while here to detail the gossip of his home-circle to his Philippine friends, in letters, when in a fortnight or so he would be recounting it to them at their own tables? The letters here printed have more than the interest of contemporary records; they paint in words, with a thousand delicate and expressive touches, the portrait of a lively and beautiful girl, with a character as striking and individual as the face that Malbone has drawn for us on ivory. Never was a reigning beauty more spirited, never was a spirited girl of fashion more truly lovable, than Eliza Bowne. Whether she be at boarding-school, writing letters to her “honored parents,” and hiding her little homesick heart in vain under the formal phrases dictated by the starched decorum of the day; or stealing an hour for her pen amid the whirl of the gay world in which she sparkled, such a cheerful star, and rattling off to her mother the story of the day’s doings—she is always the same generous, unselfish creature; impulsive, but with her impulses well in hand; a heart brimming over with mirth, its clear crystal clouded by no drop of malice; witty, but with a friendly glint in her mischievous eyes, even when, as now and then happens, she gives formality or presumption a fillip. Love and friendship followed her wherever she went in her too brief span of life, and fortune heaped her girlish lap with all good things; but she showed herself worthy of her blessings, and kept herself unspotted from the world.