irm enough for so durable a tie as friendship."

We like to dwell upon these inner phases of a famous and powerful
coterie, not only because they bring before us so vividly the living,
moving, thinking, loving women who composed it, letting us into their
intimate life with its quiet shadings, its fantastic humors, and its
wayward caprices, but because they lead us to the fountain head of a
new form of literary expression. We have seen that the formal letters of
Balzac were among the early entertainments of the Hotel de Rambouillet,
and that Voiture had a witty or sentimental note for every occasion.
Mlle. de Scudery held a ready pen, and was in the habit of noting down
in her letters to absent friends the conversation, which ran over a
great variety of topics, from the gossip of the moment to the gravest
questions. There was no morning journal with its columns of daily news,
no magazine with its sketches of contemporary life, and these private
letters were passed from one to another to be read and discussed. The
craze for clever letters spread. Conversations literally overflowed upon
paper. A romantic adventure, a bit of scandal, a drawing room incident,
or a personal pique, was a fruitful theme. Everybody aimed to excel in
an art which brought a certain prestige. These letters, most of which
had their brief day, were often gathered into little volumes. Many have
long since disappeared, or found burial in the dust of old libraries
from which they are occasionally exhumed to throw fresh light upon some
forgotten nook and by way of an age whose habits and manners, virtues
and follies, they so faithfully record. A few, charged with the vitality
of genius, retain their freshness and live among the enduring monuments
of the society that gave them birth. The finest outcome of this
prevailing taste was Mme. de Sevigne, who still reigns as the queen
of graceful letter writers. Although her maturity belongs to a later
period, she was familiar with the Rambouillet circle in her youth, and
inherited its best spirit.

The charm of this literature is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim,
but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like
to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is
something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. They give us all the
accessories. They tell us how they lived, how they dressed, how they
thought, how they acted. They talk of their plans, their loves, and