Naboth, and she wrote in the letters, saying, (2 Kings v, 5, 6, 7; 2
Kings x, 1, 2, 6, 7.) The king of Syria wrote a letter to the king of
Israel, and therewith sent Naaman, his servant, to be cured of his
leprosy: 'And it came to pass when the king of Israel read the letter,
that he rent his clothes.'

Now this occurred about nine hundred years before the Christian era;
and, about twenty years later, we are told that Jehu wrote letters and
sent them to Samaria. A second time he transmitted other letters of a
similar import, which were cruelly obeyed.

Then there is the threatening letter of the king of Assyria to Hezekiah,
set forth in the second book of Kings, and also the complimentary
letter from Berodach-Baladan to the same king of Judah after his
sickness; a king who subsequently appears himself to have written
letters to the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, to summon them to
Jerusalem. (2 Kings xix, 14; xx, 12; 2 Chron. xxx, 1-6.)

Cyrus, after publishing his decree giving liberty to the Jews to return
to their own country and rebuild the house of the Lord at Jerusalem,
wrote letters recommendatory to the governors of several provinces to
assist the Jews in their undertaking; one of which letters Josephus has
recorded as being addressed to the governors of Syria, and commencing
with the regular epistolary salutation, 'Cyrus, the king, to Sysina and
Sarabasan sendeth a greeting.' And while the children of the captivity
were rebuilding their temple (and this was five hundred and twenty-two
years before Christ), there was a frequent correspondence by letters
between, their adversaries and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. Now,
supposing the invention, in any modified sense, of letter writing _on
paper_, or what may answer to the idea conveyed by that term, is in any
measure attributable to the daughter of Cyrus, this was quite a matter
of course and in accordance with the general practice.

Still, let us not be disposed to take away from the royal lady the honor
of having invented an art which her sex have, in modern years, carried
to a perfection scarcely attainable by the male sex; for it may be set
down as an axiom that one woman's letter is worth a dozen letters by
men.

After all, the instances of communication by means of letter writing to
which allusions have thus been made are plainly no specimens of that use
of the invention which constitutes it the medium of free thought and
intelligence, or even the simple