ert provincialism, we can detect that mysterious
quality which distinguishes the good letter-writer. She writes to please
two people--her correspondent and herself; she has no need, therefore,
to canvass general truths, but can afford to be personal and charming.
Her artful wit gives pith and moment to the most trivial enterprises,
and turns domestic projects into adventures of high romance. She never
makes great things small by declamation; she prefers to make small
things great by insinuation. Her friend is assumed to be interested in
all that concerns herself, so she is not afraid to be intimate; and a
correspondent both clever and intimate is one of those things that make
life precious. In a word, her letters (which, to our dismay, besides
occupying a bare third of the two volumes, are towards the end
disastrously affected by the style of her lover) succeed in giving a
whimsical view of her ordinary and external life, viewed from
standpoints above and beyond the reach of externals--the head and the
heart. Her account of the affair with Mr. Dugald G---- is, in its way, a
little masterpiece, but too long for quotation. We select a shorter
specimen of her style:

"Such a week I spent in Galloway! There was no amusement within
doors, and the weather precluded the chance of finding any without.
'Coelebs in Search of a Wife' was the only book in the house, and
even that was monopolized by a young lady who came to my Uncle's (I
strongly suspect) on Coeleb's errand. The rest of us had no weapon
of any sort to combat time with, and for four whole days I sat
counting the drops of rain that fell from the ceiling into a bowl
beneath, or in burbling the chain of my watch for the pleasure of
undoing it. 'Oh, Plato! what tasks for a philosopher!' At length in
a frenzy of ennui I mounted a brute of a horse that could do nothing
but trot, and rode till I was ready to drop from the saddle--just
for diversion. I left my companions wondering when it would be fair;
and when I returned they were still wondering. How very few people
retain their faculties in rainy weather!"

We can hardly make evident by short quotations the difference between
the letters of a gifted person and of one who had a gift for
letter-writing; the reader, however, who will be at pains to take Lamb's
correspondence from the shelf and compare his letters with those of Mrs.
Carlyle will no doubt discover w