abstainer as he often was, he
would, I expect, denounce the principle involved in 'Local Option.' I am
not at all sure he would not borrow a guinea from a bystander and become
a subscriber to the 'Property Defence League;' and though it is notorious
that he never read any book all through, and never could be got to
believe that anybody else ever did, he would, I think, read a larger
fraction of Mr. Spencer's pamphlet, '_Man_ versus _the State_,' than of
any other 'recent work in circulation.' The state of the Strand, when
two vestries are at work upon it, would, I am sure, drive him into open
rebellion.

As a letter-writer Johnson has great merits. Let no man despise the
epistolary art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. Good letters
were always scarce. It does not follow that, because our grandmothers
wrote long letters, they all wrote good ones, or that nobody nowadays
writes good letters because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote
letters in two styles. One was monumental--more suggestive of the chisel
than the pen. In the other there are traces of the same style, but, like
the old Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and become the
fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and sorrow--of affection, wit, and
fancy. The letter to Lord Chesterfield is the most celebrated example of
the monumental style. From the letters to Mrs. Thrale many good examples
of the domesticated style might be selected One must suffice:

'Queeney has been a good girl, and wrote me a letter. If Burney said
she would write, she told you a fib. She writes nothing to me. She
can write home fast enough. I have a good mind not to tell her that
Dr. Bernard, to whom I had recommended her novel, speaks of it with
great commendation, and that the copy which she lent me has been read
by Dr. Lawrence three times over. And yet what a gipsy it is. She no
more minds me than if I were a Branghton. Pray, speak to Queeney to
write again. . . . Now you think yourself the first writer in the
world for a letter about nothing. Can you write such a letter as
this? So miscellaneous, with such noble disdain of regularity, like
Shakspeare's works; such graceful negligence of transition, like the
ancient enthusiasts. The pure voice of Nature and of Friendship. Now,
of whom shall I proceed to speak? of whom but Mrs. Montague? Having
mentioned Shakspeare and Nature, does not the name of Mon