publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise, as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking up. But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication. During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse, as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely attained. FOOTNOTES: [7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3) _Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88. Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895. (5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh Review_, April 1896. [8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895. [9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.