As the depository of secrets innumerable, the Public Writer was a most important personage; or would have been had he been able to take full literary advantage of the confidences entrusted to him. Richardson’s knowledge of the female heart is said to have been due to the good faith with which he inspired a number of young ladies, who thereupon gave him, unconsciously, material for such characters as Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe. They consulted him now and then about their love letters. But the Public Writer had love letters, letters of reproach, letters of explanation, letters of farewell, to write every day, and by the dozen. It is not recorded, however, that any Public Writer was sufficiently inspired, or sufficiently interested in his habitual work to turn the dramatic materials which must often have come beneath him into novels or plays. [Illustration: HEARSE COACHMAN.] [Illustration: AN INVITATION TO A “PETIT VERRE.”] The personage known as the Public Writer was at least a more useful institution than the book entitled “The Complete Letter-Writer,” the function of which is to supply correspondence in regard to every possible incident in life. The Public Writer was, if up to his work, capable of suiting his language to peculiar cases, whereas the Complete Letter-Writer was an oracle whose utterances came forth hard and fast, in such a way that the ignorant devotees could not change them. Thus the illiterate persons who could not read at all had a clear advantage over those whose education enabled them to read the Complete Letter-Writer, but not to apply it. In an excellent farce by M. Varin, one of the best comic dramatists of the French stage, an amusing _equivoque_--or _quiproquo_ as the French say--is caused by an ignorant young man in some house of business addressing a love letter to the dark-haired daughter of his employer, which expresses admiration for locks of gold such as belong in profusion, not to the girl, but to her buxom mother. When the husband’s jealousy is excited and a variety of comic incidents have resulted therefrom, it appears that the unlettered and moreover foolish young clerk has copied his epistle out of a letter-book, and, thinking apparently that one love letter would do as well as another, has addressed to a girl with dark hair a declaration intended by the author of the Complete Letter-Writer for a woman who is beautifully blonde. No such mistake as this could have occurred had the amorous young clerk told his case to a Public Writer, and ordered an appropriate letter for the occasion.