On the whole, whether postscripts are defensible or not, it is clear that their history is eminently interesting. Some valuable matter has from time to time been put into them. There is at least one letter of Thomas Gray's, written in 1764 to the Rev. Norton Nicholls, the 'P.S.' of which is worth the whole of the remainder of the communication, so charming a bit of descriptive writing is embodied in it. Then, how full of good stuff are the epistolary addenda of Charles Lamb, with whom 'the cream of the correspondence' (as Tony Lumpkin has it) was very often rather in the postscript than in 'the inside of the letter,' in the sense of its larger portion. It is in one of these addenda that one finds the first record of a well-known sentence: 'Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly observes, has set in with its usual severity.' Elsewhere one comes across such tributes as: 'My friend Hood, a prime genius and hearty fellow, brings this.' Always characteristic in thought and in expression, Lamb was never more so than in the finales to his letters. 'I do not think your handwriting at all like ----'s,' he says to Southey; 'I do not think many things I did think.' He winds up a dog-Latin epistle to Bernard Barton, in 1831, with: 'P.S.--Perdita in toto est Billa Reformatura.' And to Coleridge he says, with delightful frankness: 'Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am _homo unius linguae_: in English--illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.' Sometimes a postscript is unconsciously full of humour, as in the case of a note written by a certain Mr. O. to a recent Bishop of Norwich: 'Mr. O----'s private affairs turn out so sadly that he cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon his lordship at his agreeable house on Monday next.--N.B. His wife is dead.' THE END. _Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row, London._ Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_. Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text. The following misprint has been corrected: "writting" corrected to "writing" (page 221) Printer's inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained. End of Project Gutenberg's By-ways in Book-land, by William Davenport Adams