eptibilities of an
influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
attained.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and
Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to
his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3)
_Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E.
Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88.
Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895.
(5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William
Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis
Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh
Review_, April 1896.

[8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895.

[9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.

THACKERAY

It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely
supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when
chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify
the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life
has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due
to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be
cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing
a man's private affair