The absolutely best friendly letter-writer known to me is Victor Jacquemont. He, too, wrote according to the inspiration of the moment, but it was so abundant that it carried him on like a steadily flowing tide. His letters are wonderfully sustained, yet they are not _composed_; they are as artless as Byron's, but much more full and regular. Many scribblers have facility, a flux of words, but who has Jacquemont's weight of matter along with it? The development of his extraordinary epistolary talent was due to another talent deprived of adequate exercise by circumstances. Jacquemont was by nature a brilliant, charming, amiable talker, and the circumstances were various situations in which this talker was deprived of an audience, being often, in long wanderings, surrounded by dull or ignorant people. Ideas accumulated in his mind till the accumulation became difficult to bear, and he relieved himself by talking on paper to friends at a distance, but intentionally only to one friend at a time. He tried to forget that his letters were passed round a circle of readers, and the idea that they would be printed never once occurred to him:-- "En écrivant aujourd'hui aux uns et aux autres, j'ai cherché à oublier ce que tu me dis de l'échange que chacun fait des lettres qu'il reçoit de moi. Cette pensée m'aurait retenu la plume, ou du moins, _ne l'aurait pas laissée couler assez nonchalamment sur le papier pour en noircir, en un jour, cinquante-huit feuilles_, comme je l'ai fait.... _Je sais et j'aime beaucoup causer à deux; à trois, c'est autre chose; il en est de même pour écrire._ Pour parler comme je pense et sans blague, _il me faut la persuasion que je ne serai lu que de celui à qui j'écris_." To read these letters, in the four volumes of them which have been happily preserved, is to live with the courageous observer from day to day, to share pleasures enjoyed with the freshness of sensation that belongs to youth and strength, and privations borne with the cheerfulness of a truly heroic spirit.