pass through it gnashing his teeth or holding his handkerchief to his
eyes. Although he did a good deal of work, sometimes under no small
difficulties, he had very little if any of that _collar_-work--that
grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of
all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of
scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without
being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will,"
and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to _get_ out
of ruts, _kept_ out of them without the least trouble. He was as little
of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a
drop of bad blood in his veins. If these things could not make a good
letter-writer nothing could; and there is little doubt that he will hold
his place as such as long as English literature lasts. It is a great
pleasure to me to give, as I hope to do, one unpublished letter of his
to myself as a sort of _bonus_ to the reader of this little book--a
letter of rather unusual interest in literary as in other respects.

At this point, perhaps, actual survey may, and indeed had best, stop:
not merely because space is closing in. Lovers of letters will of course
detect what seem to them omissions in what has gone before and what
comes after. Some of these, no doubt, will have been real oversights.
Others, for this or that reason deliberate, such as Gibbon and
Newman--the latter not merely for his re-statement of the
character-value of correspondence, but for his exemplifications of
it--might certainly have been more fully noticed. But in regard to later
writers there are several obstacles in the path. Of some it would not be
easy to speak on account of their own lives being too recent: in regard
of nearly all the same fact must have occasioned exercise of
"censorship" to a degree which makes absolute judgment of their
competence as epistolers rash, and comparative judgment almost
impossible. To take up once more one example of men who were born a full
or almost a full century ago, Mr. Paul,[50] speaking apparently with
intimate knowledge of the originals, speaks also of the "severe process
of excision and retrenchment to which these [_the letters of Mr. Matthew
Arnold_] have been exposed." And he thinks that very few letters "could
have endured" it. Those who remember the appearance of these letters
will also remember that some critics