The idea of communicating to the sovereigns of Europe by letter, news of the literature, science, and philosophy of Paris, that centre of the world’s cultivation, was not a new one. In limiting the freedom of the press, sovereigns had limited their own freedom. Newspapers were official bulletins, not daring to utter unacceptable truths or unpalatable opinions on any truths. Kings, as well as their subjects, yawned over journals of this kind. So King Frederick the Great originated the idea of paying an intelligent man in Paris to write him direct the news and the gossip of the capital. Theriot, Voltaire’s friend, filled the post very unsuccessfully, and Frederick complained bitterly that Theriot never had a cold in his head without scribbling four pages of rodomontade to tell him about it. La Harpe occupied the same position to the Czarevitch Paul, and Suard and the Abbé Raynal, Grimm’s nurse and friend, to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha. The idea was good, but it had been badly worked out. As Diderot and d’Alembert quickened into mighty life the little Encyclopædia of Chambers, so Grimm breathed vitality into the languishing ‘Literary Correspondence.’ He saw in it, first of all, the germ of a great career; but he saw in it, too, an influence which, by informing the minds of kings, might change the destiny of kingdoms. To teach the people was difficult in those days; to teach their rulers was well nigh impossible. Here, then, was a chance, the one splendid chance, of showing them the progress of the world, the ominous advance of knowledge and of the old order towards the new. Raynal handed over to Grimm the correspondence he had established with the Courts of the north and south of Germany; and with this small connection Grimm began his work. The ‘Literary Correspondence’ remains to-day the only literary review which has survived the passage of time, and is still not merely a great name, but a great living work. The ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Tatler’ of Addison and Steele are kept eternally fresh by an exquisite charm of style; but they rarely aspired to serious criticism, and are mainly a record of modes and manners, not of literature or of science. The ‘Literary Correspondence’ is as much to-day as on the day it was written, the guide-book to the letters, the art, and the drama of the eighteenth century; the open door to its society and to the mind of cultivated Paris; a book which is equally indispensable to the scholar or to the novelist writing of its period, and which is certainly both the most instructive and the most amusing literary compilation extant.