My brother's wild adventures amongst these desperate sea rovers were afterwards communicated in long letters to a female relative; and, even as letters, apart from the fearful burden of their contents, I can bear witness that they had very extraordinary merit. This, in fact, was the happy result of writing from his heart; feeling profoundly what he communicated, and anticipating the profoundest sympathy with all that he uttered from her whom he addressed. A man of business, who opened some of these letters, in his character of agent for my brother's five guardians, and who had not any special interest in the affair, assured me that, throughout the whole course of his life, he had never read any thing so affecting, from the facts they contained, and from the sentiments which they expressed; above all, the yearning for that England which he remembered as the land of his youthful pleasures, but also of his youthful degradations. Three of the guardians were present at the reading of these letters, and were all affected to tears, not-withstanding they had been irritated to the uttermost by the course which both myself and my brother had pursued--a course which seemed to argue some defect of judgment, or of reasonable kindness, in themselves. These letters, I hope, are still preserved, though they have been long removed from my control. Thinking of them, and their extraordinary merit, I have often been led to believe that every post town (and many times in the course of a month) carries out numbers of beautifully-written letters, and more from women than from men; not that men are to be supposed less capable of writing good letters,--and, in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter writers of past or present times, a large overbalance happens to have been men,--but that more frequently women write from their hearts; and the very same cause operates to make female letters good which operated at one period to make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of orators or professional cultivators of the Roman language--and which, at another period, in the Byzantine court, operated to preserve the purity of the mother idiom within the nurseries and the female drawing rooms of the palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards and the academic--in the standards of the pulpit and the throne.