Madame de Sevigne were all saved, and not many written to her; because
Swift burnt the letters that were the dearest things in life to him,
while "MD" both made a treasury of his; and because Prue kept all the
letters which Steele wrote to her from their marriage-day onwards, and
Steele kept none of hers.

In Swift's case the silence is full of echoes; that is to say, his
letters repeat the phrases of Stella's and Dingley's, to play with them,
flout them, and toss them back against the two silenced voices. He never
lets the word of these two women fall to the ground; and when they have
but blundered with it, and aimed it wide, and sent it weakly, he will
catch it, and play you twenty delicate and expert juggling pranks with it
as he sends it back into their innocent faces. So we have something of
MD's letters in the "journal," and this in the only form in which we
desire them, to tell the truth; for when Swift gravely saves us some
specimens of Stella's wit, after her death, as she spoke them, and not as
he mimicked them, they make a sorry show.

In many correspondences, where one voice remains and the other is gone,
the retort is enough for two. It is as when, the other day, the half of
a pretty quarrel between nurse and child came down from an upper floor to
the ears of a mother who decided that she need not interfere. The voice
of the undaunted child it was that was audible alone, and it replied,
"I'm not; _you_ are"; and anon, "I'll tell _yours_." Nothing was really
missing there.

But Steele's letters to Prue, his wife, are no such simple matter. The
turn we shall give them depends upon the unheard tone whereto they reply.
And there is room for conjecture. It has pleased the more modern of the
many spirits of banter to supply Prue's eternal silence with the voice of
a scold. It is painful to me to complain of Thackeray; but see what a
figure he makes of Prue in "Esmond." It is, says the nineteenth-century
humourist, in defence against the pursuit of a jealous, exacting,
neglected, or evaded wife that poor Dick Steele sends those little notes
of excuse: "Dearest Being on earth, pardon me if you do not see me till
eleven o'clock, having met a schoolfellow from India"; "My dear, dear
wife, I write to let you know I do not come home to dinner, being obliged
to attend some business abroad, of which I shall give you an account
(when I see you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedient
husband"; "De