'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house, large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat in my corner.' We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability, and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so vigorously as heretofore.