lly extant, mislaid or lost--anything
better than the examples which are now accessible, and which are for the
most part the very opposite in every respect of the famous and
delectable Diary. They are perfectly "proper," and for the most part
extremely dull; while propriety is certainly not the most salient
characteristic of the Diary; and the diarist manages, in the most
eccentric manner, to communicate interest not merely to things more
specially regarded as "interesting," but to his accounts and his
ailments, his business and his political history. His contemporary and
rather patronising friend Evelyn keeps his performances less far apart
from each other: but is certainly, though a representative, not a great
letter-writer, and the few that we have of Pepys' patronised
fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden are of no great mark, though not superfluous.
In the earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken off its
control as the epistolary language; and it was not till quite the other
end that English itself became supple and docile enough for the purposes
of the letter-writer proper. It was excellent for such things as formal
Dedications, semi-historical narratives, and the like. And it could, as
in Sir Thomas Browne's, supply another contrast, much more pleasing than
that referred to above, of domestic familiarity with a most poetical
transcendence of style in published work. Yet, as was the case with the
novel, the letter, to gain perfection, still wanted something easier
than the grand style of the seventeenth century and more polished than
its familiar style.

III

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY]

But whatever may be the position of the seventeenth in respect of
letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance,
hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in
the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent
of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European
literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence--French
and English--the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters:
and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most
famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray and
Cowper--belong wholly to it; and "Lady Mary"--our most famous
she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield,
whom some not bad judges would put not