Something should be said of the literary merit of these letters. The name of Richardson has been mentioned; but Richardson never wrote anything so fresh from the heart, so playful in their sincerity, as some of the letters to her cousin, Moses Porter; nor could Richardson have touched with so light a hand the story of the drive home in the snow-storm after the Assembly ball, or the account of the game of Loo, when, with a fluttering heart, she stands, divided between the eager desire to read the letter she has just slipped into her pocket, and the impatient calls of her partners to join them at the game. Fanny Burney, and Fanny Burney alone, could have written letters like these. They are not, however, the letters of a practised writer, nor was there ever in her mind any thought of publication. It was the age of “epistolary correspondence:” all the girls of Miss Southgate’s acquaintance were writing letters to their friends, long ones, often, made up in the manner of a diary, with a week’s doings recorded day by day; for postage was dear, and to send blank paper an extravagance, and no doubt, like her friends, she forgot her letters as soon as they were sent off. Her correspondents were not so indifferent, however, and they kept her letters carefully. Her mother, to whom the most of them were written, left those sent to herself as a bequest to her granddaughter, Mrs. John W. Lawrence, the “little Mary” of the later letters. Mrs. Bowne died in the same year in which this daughter was born; but her sister-in-law, Miss Caroline Bowne, who devoted herself to the care of the little girl after her mother’s death, instilled into her heart such an affection for her parent’s memory that she came to cherish it with an almost religious devotion, and guarded as a sacred relic everything that had belonged to her. To the letters left her by her grandmother, Mrs. Lawrence added all she could collect from other persons with whom her mother had corresponded. They came to her in a sad state, from much reading and passing about from hand to hand; and to preserve their contents she copied the whole collection, with the greatest care, in her neat, methodical handwriting, into two small books, and these, in her turn, she bequeathed to her children, as her grandmother had bequeathed the originals to her.