For letter writing, although the most natural of literary gifts, is not wholly due to nature. It is the outcome of many qualities which need cultivation; the soil that produces such fruit must have been carefully tilled. In our day epistolary correspondence has been in great measure destroyed by the penny post and by rapidity of communication. In the last century postage was costly: and although the burden was frequently and unjustly lightened by franks, the transmission of letters was slow and uncertain. Letters, therefore, were seldom written unless the writer had something definite to say, and had leisure in which to say it. Much time was spent in the occupation, letters were carefully preserved as family heirlooms, and thus it has come to pass that much of our knowledge of the age, and very much of the pleasure to be gained from a study of the period, is due to its letter writers. The list of them is a striking one, for it includes the names of Swift and Steele, of Pope and Gay, of Bolingbroke and Chesterfield, of Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Thrale, and of the three gifted rivals in the art, Gray, Horace Walpole, and Cowper. In the band of authors famous for their correspondence, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu holds a conspicuous place. Reference has been already made to the Pope correspondence, large in bulk and large too in interest. To this Lady Mary contributed slightly, and the greater portion of her letters were addressed to her husband, to her sister, Lady Mar, and to her daughter, the Countess of Bute. She was shrewd enough to know their value: 'Keep my letters,' she wrote, 'they will be as good as Madame de Sévigné's forty years hence;' and they are, perhaps, as good as letters can be which are written with a sense of their value, which Madame de Sévigné's were not. Lady Mary, who may be said to have belonged to the wits from her infancy, for in her eighth year she was made the toast of the Kit Kat Club, was not only a beauty, but a woman of some learning and of the keenest intelligence. At twenty she translated the _Encheiridion_ of Epictetus. She was a great reader and a good critic, unless, which often happened, political prejudices warped her judgment. She had considerable facility in rhyming, and both with tongue and pen cultivated many enmities, the deadliest of her foes being the poet who was at one time her most ardent admirer. The story of Lady Mary's career, with its vicissitudes and singularities, may be read in Lord Wharncliffe's edition of her _Life and Letters_. She is a prominent figure in the literature of the period, and made several passing contributions to it, but apart from a few facile and far from decent verses her letters are the sole legacy she has left behind her for the literary student. Some of them, and especially those addressed to her sister the Countess of Mar, are often coarse; those to her daughter the Countess of Bute exhibit good sense, and all abound in