und
world, of all that dwell therein, can be found one half so 'mean' as the
betrayer and revealer of another's secrets? A whip should be placed in
every honest hand to lash the rascal naked through the world. He should
be fastened in an air-tight mail bag, and sent jolting and bouncing,
amid innumerable letters and packages and ponderous franked documents of
members of Congress, over all the roughest roads of our Northwestern
country!

To return to what a letter should be. It seems, upon the whole, to have
been Cicero's opinion--and in this we shall fain agree as well as in his
view of the secrecy of letters--that, whether the subject be solemn or
familiar, learned or colloquial, general or particular, political or
domestic, an easy, vivacious, unaffected diction gives to epistolary
writing its proper grace and perfection.

In very truth, good letter writing is little else than conversation upon
paper, carried on between parties personally separate, with this
especial advantage, that it brings the minds of the interlocutors into
reciprocal action, with more room for reflection, and with, fewer
disturbances than can usually consist with personal conversation.

We have thus made mention of Cicero as the greatest of authorities with
regard to this subject, because he was himself the greatest of letter
writers. The epistle was the shape in which his versatile and beautiful
mind most gracefully ran and moulded itself. His fluctuating and
unstable character no less than his vanity and love of distinction,
seemed to minister occasion to those varied forms of diction and
expression in which the genius of animated letter writing may be said to
delight. Read his 'Familiar Letters,' if not in Latin, yet in
translation, if you wish to study the most perfect specimens of this
style--a style which has not been equalled or approached since his day.

Next to the letters of the great Roman orator, merit points to those of
the philosopher Seneca. He, too, cultivates and enjoins an easy and
unstudied diction. So great is the excellence of his letters; so nearly
is their beauty allied to the beauty of our Holy Scriptures; so does he
seem to anticipate the morals and teachings of our Christian
dispensation, that it is almost reprehensible to speak of them at all,
without setting forth their extraordinary charms of style and thought,
even in a larger space than the present article can be allowed to
occupy.

After Seneca, the next most