doubtful field of experiment.

What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers--to Madame de Sevigne, to
Gray, to Walpole and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies
a letter-reader, and just that inadequacy of spoken communication
will smother up our written words. Madame de Sevigne must placate her
high-sniffing daughter, Gray must please himself; Walpole must at any
cost be lively, Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate
the judgment of the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the
looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose
that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin
thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree
with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be
merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic
turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it
in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on account of my
dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that
but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to
confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I can utter can be
taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature."
So I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his
states of soul, until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of
mind and disease of body. Revelation, then, like gouts of blood,
did issue, but of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a
crisis.

_Parva componere magnis_, there is a letter contained in _The Early
Diary of Frances Burney_(ed. Mrs. A.R. Ellis, 1889), more completely
apocalyptic than anything else of the kind accessible to me. Its
writer was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife,
therefore half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young
lady who could let herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal,
as Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous, uncommon, lively, comical,
entertaining, frank, and undisguised"--or because of it--she
did contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more
thoroughly than the many times more expert. You have her here in the
pangs of a love-affair, of how long standing I don't know, but now
evidently in a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in elopement,
post-chaise, clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth-century. Here
it is in an earlier state, all morti