A most disagreeable instance of this most disagreeable practice is that of a son of Robert Browning, who has won literary renown and popular commendation by publishing his parents’ love-letters. Doubtless he is proud of his work, but in the eyes of his sainted father, I fear, he is one of Mr. Noguchi’s “unexpected persons,” at least in the sense that he is not expected in Paradise. Another and more recent illustration is the book _My Soldier_, the sanguinary work of a wife. Observe with what celerity the forehanded family of Tennyson “improved the occasion” of his passing. The poor man was hardly cold before they thrust a volume of Shakspeare into his dead hand, clove it with his finger at a significant passage chosen by a domestic council, admitted a consistent ray of moonshine into the death chamber and invited the world to witness the edifying show. So the man who wrote Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me was made to seem to “pass out to sea” in an impressive pose, appropriately spectacular and dramatically ridiculous. If there is a Better Land it is where a great man can grow up from the ground like a tree, without human agency, get on without a friend, write no letters and leave no name at which himself grew pale, to point a lying anecdote or tale. To the perils herein pointed out authors are peculiarly exposed. The world has apparently agreed that he who writes for publication shall write for nothing else. I have heard men of decent life and social repute gravely defend the thesis that the public has a _right_ to all that an author has written; and as his letters are likely to be rather more interesting than those of one who works at another trade, they are held to have a value disproportionate to the mere fame of their writer. We all concede the virtue of abstention from theft of a paste jewel, but a real diamond!—that is another matter. The people are not pigs; the author of their favorite personal letters need not have a great personal renown. If he has uttered a sufficient body of private correspondence they are willing to forgive him for their inattention to his public work. Their purveyors are even more liberal in the matter: they do not insist on an excellent epistolary style nor anything of that kind. An intimate “human document” in ailing syntax is quite as available for their purpose as one baring the heart of a grammarian. _The Filial Correspondence of George Ade_ is foredoomed to as sharp a competition among dealers as _The Love Letters of Professor Harry Thurston Peck, Stylist._