Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary _sand flood_, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. _They_ are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional _literati_. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, _verve_, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was _par excellence_ the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too _composed_. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write _to_ his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are