The other offence of selling letters is still more heinous; it is difficult to conceal the piracy of a romance for theatrical purposes, but it is perfectly easy to conceal the sale of letters; head it the sale of autographs, and it passes with entire impunity. There is, I believe, a law (a written law) that letters are the property of the writer of them; but it is absolutely a dead law; as dead as many of those of the Tudors or Stuarts. I think that letters ought to be the property of the recipient, but it should be an inalienable property which he should be no more able to sell than he is able to sell entailed property. To write a letter, even a brief one, is, in a sense, an act of confidence. In writing it we assume that its contents will not be used against us, either for injury or ridicule. If a conversation be considered confidential, how much more should a correspondence be so! A letter, in any degree intimate, is a hostage given into the hands of its recipient. We are justified in expecting that any sentiments, views, or opinions it may contain shall not go beyond the reader for whom they have been penned. This is so much to be desired in the interests of all letter-writers that no one, I think, can dispute its justice. What, then, are we to say of the constant appearance in catalogues of sales of letters of living, and of lately dead, persons? If it be, as I understand, illegal, why is it permitted publicly? If it be not thus illegal, why does not general indignation render it impossible? I have more than once seen, in the autograph-albums of men and women of the world, letters of the most intimate character by distinguished writers; letters which have been evidently written in the careless, open-heartedness of a warm friendship, and which were lying on a drawing-room or library table, open to the sneer, the jest, or the wonder of everyone who turned over the pages of the book. 'N'y touchez pas, N'y touchez pas! Je l'ai payé vingt louis!' cried, in my hearing, a lady (a _rastaquouère_), who owned amongst other autographs a letter which it was especially wrong to place in such a collection, since the writer of it is great and is alive. Not for twenty louis, not for twenty thousand, should it ever have been purchasable. What traitor sold it? What servant stole it? How did it find its way into the market, that familiar and intimate thing? Through treachery, through death, through accident, through greed? We shall never know. It was certainly not through friendship. Surely, also, some unwritten law should prescribe and limit the license of caricature. It is scarcely fair that, because a personality has interest and eminence attached to it, every draughtsman who can scrawl a line can make that personality hideous or ridiculous at pleasure. 'You cannot like it?' I said once to a person of considerable eminence, who was the subject that week of one of the 'Portraits' of a satirical and political English journal of wide circulation.