We all know how the present action of our new civilisation works to the impairing of Privacy. As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits. There are some limits, however, which ought to be preserved with vigilance and care, as indispensable, not only to comfort, but to some of the finest virtues and graces of mind and life. It is to be hoped that the privacy of _vivâ voce_ conversation will ever remain sacred: but it is known that that which ought to be as holy, that of epistolary correspondence,--(the private conversation of distant friends,) is constantly and deliberately violated, where there are certain inducements to do so. The press works so diligently and beneficially for society at large, that there is a tendency to commit everything to it, on utilitarian considerations of a rather coarse kind: and the moment it can be made out that the publication of anything will and may do some ostensible good, the thing is published,--whatever considerations of a different or a higher sort may lie behind. If the people of note in society were inquired of, they would say that the privilege--the right--of privacy of epistolary correspondence now exists only for the obscure;--and for them, only till some person meets them whose zeal for the public good leads him to lay hold on all material by which anybody may be supposed likely to learn anything. As for people of note,--their letters are naturally preserved by the recipients: when the writer dies, these recipients are plied with entreaties and remonstrances,--placed in a position of cruel difficulty (as it is to many) between their delicacy of affection for the deceased, and the pain of being made responsible for intercepting his fame, and depriving society of the benefit of the disclosure of his living mind.