They certainly contain many things worth the knowing. The writer’s descriptions of foreign scenes and incidents are full of life and spirit, generally truthful, and always effective without marring the truth. There is one passage in one of her ladyship’s letters which illustrates the writer’s power in a particularly delicate matter, which is well deserving notice. Mr. Montagu’s sister died. She had been Lady Mary Pierrepont’s dearest friend. Young Montagu had to communicate the news of his sister’s death to the young Lady Mary. In her reply the latter said: ‘I know it is not acting in form, but I do not look upon you as I do upon the rest of the world. You are brother to a woman whom I tenderly loved.’ The young fellow excused the informality; he was proud of being looked upon by the young beauty in a different way from the rest of the world. As that young beauty reminded him that he was brother to the woman she so tenderly loved, he was not dull, and had no difficulty in persuading her to love the brother even better than she had done the sister. The marriage, however, was not made in heaven. The lady herself had some suspicion about the consequences. ‘I tremble,’ she wrote to her intended husband, ‘for what we are doing. Shall we never repent?... I shall come to you only with a nightgown and petticoat, and that is all you will get by me.’ She adds significantly: ‘I had rather die than return to a dependency upon relations I have disobliged.’ In her first letter to her (absent) husband after marriage she alludes to the children of the family in which she was residing, and says: ‘It furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our future life, and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying with you the same satisfaction ... when the noise of a nursery may have more charms for us than the music of the opera.’ While on the subject of the publication of posthumous letters, we may add that other men besides Johnson have written their own so as to gratify posterity as little as possible. Some are as cautious with respect to contemporaries. One of the most venerable of our peers was once told that several of his letters were catalogued for sale in a London auction room. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me,’ said the noble lord; ‘from the day I became a public man I never wrote a line worth the reading by anyone except the person to whom my letter was addressed.’