In those old days heavy postage made long letters. As the receivers paid the postage they naturally expected their money’s worth. Often a sheet of Bath post, or even of foolscap, was crossed and recrossed, and not a hair’s breadth of the paper was left without its line. A letter then was written bit by bit, day after day, till the whole was completed. It was, in its way, a newspaper or a book; it was sent all through the branches of a family; it was lent to friends; it even went to mere acquaintances, and strangers made extracts from the choicest parts of it. In the second series of Miss Mitford’s ‘Letters and Correspondence’ she refers to one of these epistles. It was written by a lord who had been travelling on the Continent, and it was a clever, sensible, and instructive document. Miss Mitford borrowed it for the purpose of copying the contents, to accomplish which cost her six mortal hours, which the lady did not think were ill-spent. When postage was high, letters were luxuries in which persons, far above the condition of those who are called poor, could not often indulge. We cannot give a better illustration of this than one we find in a letter addressed by Mr. Collins, the artist, to his brother, in 1816, when the landscape painter was twenty-eight years of age. Collins was then at Hastings sketching, and had invited his brother to come down from Saturday to Monday. ‘The whole amount of the expense would be the coach, provided you put two biscuits in your pocket, which would answer as a lunch; and I would have dinner for you, which would not increase _my_ expenditure _above tenpence_. I shall be at the place where the coach stops for you, should you be able to come. Write me nothing about it unless you have other business, _for a letter costs a dinner_.’ This was the artist who was overjoyed to receive fifty pounds for his ‘Cromer Sands,’ the picture for which, at the sale of the Gillott collection, a purchaser was found to give, quite as joyously, three thousand seven hundred and eighty guineas.