Such suggestions as have been thrown out are too obvious to have escaped any one who has given the subject a moment's thought. But who has time for that? People live too fast, in these days, to pay such attention as should be paid to those who are more valuable as individuals than as parts of the great world. The good offices of friendship, which are the fulfilment of the highest social duties, are poorly performed, and, indeed, little understood. Not many of those who think at all think beyond the line of established custom and routine. They may take pains in their letters to obey the ordinary rules of grammar, to avoid the use of slang phrases and vulgar expressions, to write a clear sentence; but how few seek for the not less imperative rules which are prescribed by politeness and good sense! Of those who should know them, no small proportion habitually, from thoughtlessness or perverseness, neglect their observance. I know men, distinguished in the walks of literature, famed for a beautiful style of composition, who do not write a tolerable letter nor answer a note of invitation with propriety. Their sentences are slipshod, their punctuation and spelling beyond criticism, and their manuscript repulsive. A lady, to whose politeness such an answer is given, has a right to feel offended, and may very properly ask whether she be not entitled to as choice language as the promiscuous crowd which the "distinguished gentleman" addresses from pulpit or desk. How the distinguished gentleman would open his eyes at the question! He is sure that what he sent her was well enough for a letter. As though a letter, especially a letter to a lady, should not be as perfect in its kind as a lecture or sermon in its kind! as though one's duties toward an individual were less stringent than one's duties toward an audience! Would the distinguished gentleman be willing to probe his soul in search of the true reason for the difference in his treatment of the two? Is he sure that it is not an outgrowth from a certain "mountainous me," which seeks approbation more ardently from the one source than from the other? There are those who indite elegant notes to comparative strangers, but, probably upon the principle that familiarity breeds or should breed contempt, send the most villanous scrawls to their intimate friends and those of their own household. They are akin to the numerous wives, who, reserving not only silks and satins, but neatness and courtesy, for company, are always in dishabille in their husbands' houses. Pericles, according to Walter Savage Landor, once wrote to Aspasia as follows:--