There is a graphic minuteness about all these trivial directions, which takes us more readily behind the curtain of Time than the most elaborate and dignified chronicles could possibly do. The Muse of History is no doubt a most stately and learned lady,--she looks very splendid in her royal attitudes on the ceilings of Blenheim and in the galleries of Windsor; but can her pompous old _stylus_ bring back for us the every-day work and pleasure of these bygone days,--paint for us the things that come home so nearly "to men's business and bosoms,"--or show us the inner life and the real action of these hearty, jolly old times, one-half so well as the simple homeliness of these careless letters? We seem to see in them the countenances of the people of those long buried years, and to catch the very echo of their voices, in the daily walk of their pleasant and hearty lives. "The dialect and costume," said Mr. Hazlitt, "the wars, the religion, and the politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (and we may now venture to add for him, of the earlier half of the eighteenth) "give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious refinement and over-labored lassitude of modern readers. Antiquity, after a time, has the grace of novelty, as old fashions revived are mistaken for new ones." In the present instance this seems to us to be, more than usually, the effect of Hancock's quaint and downright style. All these letters of his, in fact, are remarkable for one thing, even beyond the general tenor of the epistolary writing of his time, and that is their _directness_. He is the very antipode to Don Adriano in "Love's Labor's Lost"; never could it be said of him that "he draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." He does not leave his correspondents to grope their way to his meaning by inferences,--_he comes to the point_. If he likes more "Macoys, Squirril & Monkys" in his wallpaper than his neighbors,--if he thinks Cox's man ought to be abated, or Glin to do the handsome thing by him, he says so, point-blank, and there's an end. ----"He pours out all, as plain As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne." Perhaps the particular phase of change which the language itself was going through at the time may assist in giving these letters, to us, something of their air of genuine force and originality. But after making due allowance for the freshness of a vocabulary as yet unimpeded by any cumbrous burden of euphemism, we are still convinced that we must recognize the source of much of the quality we have noted only in the _naïve_ and outspoken nature of the writer. For, if ever there was a man who knew just what he wanted and just how he wanted it, it was the T. H. of the amusing correspondence before us.