It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P. note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record. She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time, but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits. Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves, I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in 1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent for our feelings. . . . But as we grow older and find more ease of expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s