FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36  
37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   >>   >|  
paid twenty-one shillings and eightpence for the postage of a letter from Shelley; readers of _The Antiquary_ will remember that Lovel paid twenty-five shillings postage for one epistle, besides half a guinea for the express rider. _Certes_ a man had good need to drive a hard bargain with the Post Office in those pinching times! Of course the "lower orders"--poor benighted souls--were not supposed to have any correspondence at all, and the game was kept up by gentlemen of fortune, by merchants, by eager and moneyed lovers, and by stray persons of literary tastes, who could manage to beg franks from members of Parliament and other dignitaries. One gentleman, not of literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by post; but this kind of postal communication was happily rare. The best of the letter-writers felt themselves bound to give their friends good worth for their money, and thus we find the long chatty letters of the eighteenth century purely delightful. I do not care much for Lord Chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on the future--perhaps on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and he spoke the truth. Fancy a man sending such stuff as this to a raw boy--"You will observe the manners of the people of the best fashion there; not that they are--it may be--the best manners in the world, but because they are the best manners of the place where you are, to which a man of sense always conforms. The nature of things is always and everywhere the same; but the modes of them vary more or less in every country, and an easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather the assuming of them at proper times and proper places, is what particularly constitutes a man of the world, and a well-bred man!" All true enough, but how shallow, and how ineffably conceited! Here is another absurd fragment--"My dear boy, let us resume our reflections upon men, their character, their manners--in a word, our reflections upon the World." It is quite like Mr. Pecksniff's finest vein. There is not a touch of nature or vital truth in the Chesterfield letters, and the most that can be said of them is that they are the work of a fairly clever man who was flattered until he lost all sense of his real size. If we take the whole bunch of finikin sermons and compare them with the one tremendous knock-down letter which Johnson sent to the dandy earl, we
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36  
37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

manners

 

Chesterfield

 

letter

 

future

 

Johnson

 

literary

 

tastes

 

letters

 

proper

 
twenty

reflections
 

nature

 

shillings

 
postage
 

correspondence

 

conformity

 
assuming
 

conceited

 
genteel
 

country


places
 

constitutes

 

ineffably

 

shallow

 

Certes

 

bargain

 

Office

 

conforms

 

epistle

 

things


fragment

 

flattered

 

fairly

 
clever
 

tremendous

 

compare

 

finikin

 
sermons
 

express

 
guinea

resume
 
eightpence
 

character

 

finest

 

Pecksniff

 

absurd

 

people

 

postal

 
communication
 

happily