ing the thing over with at all costs is
not so bad after all. There are those who lament the passing of the
ceremonious letter and others who regret that the "literary" letter--the
kind of letter that can be published--is no longer with us. But the old
letter of ceremony was not really more useful than a powdered wig, and
as for the sort of letter that delights the heart and lightens the labor
of the biographer--well, that is still being written by the kind of
person who can write it. It is better that a letter should be written
because the writer has something to say than as a token of culture.
Some of the letters of our dead great do too often remind us that they
were not forgetful of posterity.

The average writer of a letter might well forget culture and posterity
and address himself to the task in hand, which, in other than the most
exceptional sort of letter, is to say what he has to say in the shortest
possible compass that will serve to convey the thought or the
information that he wants to hand on. For a letter is a conveyance of
thought; if it becomes a medium of expression it is less a letter than a
diary fragment.

Most of our letters in these days relate to business affairs or to
social affairs that, as far as personality is concerned, might as well
be business. Our average letter has a rather narrow objective and is not
designed to be literature. We may, it is true, write to cheer up a sick
friend, we may write to tell about what we are doing, we may write that
sort of missive which can be classified only as a love letter--but
unless such letters come naturally it is better that they be not
written. They are the exceptional letters. It is absurd to write them
according to rule. In fact, it is absurd to write any letter according
to rule. But one can learn the best usage in correspondence, and that is
all that this book attempts to present.

The heyday of letter writing was in the eighteenth century in England.
George Saintsbury, in his interesting "A Letter Book," says:

"By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in
the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and
decadence--French and English--the very palmiest day of the art.
Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters
well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace
Walpole, Gray, and Cowper--belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'--our
most famous she-ditto--b