Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist, Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina” and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a characteristic _introduced_ letter here and there in a novel, as Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form; yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly unendurable. The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection, humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s “Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the parody. But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the sure index of a character.”