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