those victoriously
exposed by the ingenious _M. Tarde_, to regard the reading of a letter
as the symmetrical opposite (the right glove matching the left, or
_inside of an outside_) of the writing thereof. Save in the case of
lovers or moonstruck persons, like those in Emerson's essay on
"Friendship," the reading of a letter is necessarily less potent, and,
as the French say, _intimate_, in emotion, than the writing of it.
Indeed, we catch ourselves repeatedly thrusting into our pocket for
perusal at greater leisure those very letters which poured out like
burning lava from their writers, or were conned over lovingly,
lingeringly altered and rewritten; and we wonder sometimes at our lack
of sympathy and wonder also (with cynicism or blushes) whether our
letters also, say that one of Tuesday----But no; _our_ letters are not
egoistical....

The thought is not one to be dwelt on in an essay, which is nothing if
it is not pleasing. So I proceed to note also that pleasure at the
contents has nothing to do with the little excitement of the arrival
of the post-bag, or of watching the clerk's slow evolutions at a
_poste restante_ window. That satisfaction is due to the mere moment's
hope for novelty, the flash past of the outer world, and the
comfortable sense of having a following, friends, relatives, clients;
and it is in proportion to the dulness of our surroundings. Great
statesmen or fortunate lovers, methinks, must turn away from aunts'
and cousins' epistles, and from the impression of so and so up the
Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only
the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those
endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed
down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the
beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of
coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is
recorded by Scott) the mail occasionally arrived at Edinburgh carrying
only one single letter, has given such letters a reputation for
delightfulness utterly disconnected with any intrinsic merit, but
which we sycophantishly accept after a hundred or two hundred years,
handing it on with hypocritical phrases about "quaintness," and "vivid
picture of the past," and similar nonsense. But the Wizard Past casts
wonderful spells. And then there is the tenderness and piety due to
those poor dead people, once strutting majestically in power, b