'I must have seemed a thankless wretch, my dear Miss Mitford,' etc. etc. 'You, my dear friend, know too well what it is to have to finish a book, to blame my not attempting,' etc. etc. 'This is the thirty-ninth letter I have written since yesterday morning,' says Harriet Martineau. 'Oh, I can scarcely hold the pen! I will not allow my shame for not having written, to prevent me from writing now.' All these people seem to have been just as busy as people are now, as amusing, as tiresome. They had the additional difficulty of having to procure franks, and of having to cover four pages instead of a post-card. OUR letters may be dull, but at all events they are not nearly so long. We come sooner to the point and avoid elegant circumlocutions. But one is struck, among other things, by the keener literary zest of those days, and by the immense numbers of MSS. and tragedies in circulation, all of which their authors confidingly send from one to another. There are also whole flights of travelling poems flapping their wings and uttering their cries as they go. An enthusiastic American critic who comes over to England emphasises the situation. Mr. Willis's 'superlative admiration' seems to give point to everything, and to all the enthusiasm. Miss Austen's Collins himself could not have been more appreciative, not even if Miss de Burgh had tried her hand at a MS.... Could he--Mr. Willis--choose, he would have tragedy once a year from Miss Mitford's pen. 'WHAT an intoxicating life it is,' he cries; 'I met Jane Porter and Miss Aikin and Tom Moore and a troop more beaux esprits at dinner yesterday! I never shall be content elsewhere.' Miss Mitford's own letters speak in a much more natural voice. 'I never could understand what people could find to like in my letters,' Miss Mitford writes, 'unless it be that they have a ROOT to them.' The root was in her own kind heart. Miss Mitford may have been wanting a little in discrimination, but she was never wanting in sympathy. She seems to have loved people for kindness's sake indiscriminately as if they were creations of her own brain: but to friendliness or to trouble of any sort she responds with fullest measure. Who shall complain if some rosy veil coloured the aspects of life for her?