as
the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
letters upon petty domesticities.

It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
loved his whole self in