to escape from all necessity of criticism, and may indulge ourselves in the pure pleasure of unalloyed admiration. The letter-writer no longer wishes to approach the great world, or to ward off those who are ambitious of its supremacy; there is no humoring of the caprices of a narrow set-no seeking to devise means how a system, philosophically commented on, may be sustained and preserved in its integrity. At the same time the writer does not write like one of a careless generation, anxious to save the tenth post of the day, and inclosing in an adhesive envelope, the crude thoughts and hasty expressions he blots upon a sheet of note-paper the size of a crown-piece. These artless artists, these consummate performers of the last century, wrote with deliberate dignity and a proper choice of words, although a certain natural happiness of expression, and the advantage they derived from following more artificial writers, enable them to handle their craft so divinely. But when we speak of their being preceded by the writer whom we have noticed above, and of this being a subsequent stage of the art, we must not let our readers suppose that we use these terms according to strict chronology. We do not mean that the historical date of the third class of letter-writers is necessarily posterior to that of the second. Gray was a year older than Horace Walpole, and was long outlived by him. We speak of the one type of letter-writing as subsequent to the other, because it must have been preceded by the state of society which only received its expression contemporaneously with, or perhaps even later than, its own manifestation. Looking at the whole history of the century, we may say that the narrow but highly-trained society of the times of George II. expanded into the wider and more natural society of the days of Johnson and Burke, although there were men in the times of George II. who seem much more akin to those of the later date than to those who were, strictly speaking, their contemporaries. After the letter-writers of the times of George II., a class succeeded who wrote with more ease and less affectation, and yet received from those who had gone before them the traditionary notion that letter-writing was an art. Among these Gray is conspicuous, and we need not hesitate to adopt him as a representative. Every day in real life we see how the accidents of worldly position determine a man's chronology. The nominee of a peer is in Parliament before his beard begins to grow, and has an official air and an inflexible political creed by the time he is twenty-five, while his school or college contemporary struggles through a profession, and at fifty they meet on the arena of public life, the one almost a generation younger than the other. Gray was neither wholly in the world nor wholly out of it. He wrote from the calm retreat of a Cambridge college, but he had personal friends who mixed in the busy and the fashionable world, and he himself occasionally quitted his retirement to spread his wings in the gayety of the metropolis. His letters reflect his manner of living. They are full of the savoir vivre which can only be attained by intercourse with society, and yet they bear constant witness to the dignified reserve of the literary recluse, and the grace and knowledge of the student and the philosopher. Above all, they delight us by their perfect freedom from any thing like a conscious aim. They breathe an elegance and are inspired with a vivacity such as is found in the Odes of Horace, where we know how great the art is, but where the sense of art is lost in the sense of its perfection. Gray had, indeed, every qualification for a letter-writer, and his letters are, we venture to think, unrivalled in the English language. He is grave and gay, humorous, learned, satirical, tender, by turns, and he passes from one mood to another with the most unfailing ease, and by the most imperceptible transitions. He writes, indeed, as if he knew that he could write a letter well, and wished to do what he did successfully; but the feeling that prompts him to exert himself is not vanity, but merely the consciousness of power. Whatever Gray wrote was written with the utmost labor. He toiled at a verse; he cast and recast it; he criticized it as ruthlessly as if it were the offspring of another's brain; he let it lie by, and then, years after, took it from the drawer where it slumbered, and dispassionately analyzed its constitution, and pronounced judgment upon its defects and merits. The man who can bear to work so slowly is sure to write nothing inferior to himself; we get his best when we get any thing. But how few men can thus become their own critics without losing fire, point, energy, the rough and unpremeditated graces of a careless and vigorous scribbler. Perhaps we must allow that Gray did, in some measure, fall short of his possibilities, and unfavorably affect the writings of other poets, by the anxious care he cultivated and inculcated. But in his letters we seem to have all the good and none of the bad attending his habits of composition. He relaxes his grim watchfulness over himself and his style, and still we may trace, in the most hasty of these effusions, the fruits of his habitual vigilance. He is impelled, by the very nature of his task, to write with speed, and to abandon himself to the impulse of the moment. But in the propriety of every expression, in the restraint he exercises over his pen, so as never to fall into any excess or redundancy, and in the position of self-respect, not to say of authority, which he occupies towards his correspondent, we trace the lime labor, the habits of patience and stern self-denial, the dignity that abhors meretricious effect of every kind, which eminently characterize his more studied compositions. Gray was what would ordinarily be called a cold man he was overshadowed by a perpetual melancholy, and his path, even in youth, was darkened by the faintly revealed presence of the fatal disease which bore him, in the ripeness of his faculties, to the grave. But, though he loved solitude, and resolutely intrenched himself within a hallowed ground of privacy, into which the world was not suffered to intrude, his letters reveal how much there was in his nature that was genial and even gay. On fitting occasions he could write with a tender and manly pathos, and a depth of sympathizing affection, that dispel effectually any notion of his melancholy being of a morbid and selfish cast. Nor are there wanting passages in his correspondence where his sense of the ludicrous, his desire to interest the friend he is addressing, and the animation inspired by near approximation to stirring events, wake him to a light and free gayety, and prompt him to paint the minor details of a subject that tickles his fancy. When we come upon such passages, we experience none of the counterbalancing sensations with which the somewhat parallel writing of Horace Walpole is sure to fill us. Gray is without the air of the petit-maître, and the smallness of mind and purpose which are apparent in all that Walpole ever wrote. When we pass to the letters of Cowper, we pass entirely away from the direct influence of the great world. Gray was on the borders, but Cowper lived altogether in another region. It was the peculiar marvel of his position-the peculiar triumph of his epistolary powers-that from the seclusion of an insignificant country town, where he lived among middle-aged ladies and low-church clergymen, he could find materials for letters so beautiful, so interesting, and so varied. The art of letter-writing has reached the point in which it becomes part of the mental furniture of a literary man whose natural tastes led him to love and cultivate all that was gentle and graceful in thought and language. Criticism seems to resign its envious office when it views these pure effusions of a sweet and loving soul. We may, indeed, find defects in them, but it is hard to feel these defects critically, for the general atmosphere of soft and warm emotion and tenderness prevents us from even noticing what might elsewhere annoy us. The greatest number of readers would find the greatest pleasure in Cowper's letters of any letters in the language, and though we venture to think that the superior manliness apparent in those of Gray is a sufficient reason for withholding our assent to this as a final test of superiority, yet it needs but the perusal of a very few of Cowper's fascinating pages to make us, for the moment, sure that his must be of all letters the best. Cowper had one advantage that was de nied to Gray. He numbered among his correspondents ladies near enough in kinship to permit complete unreserve, and remote enough to make an air of subdued gallantry sit naturally on him as he wrote. His cousin, Lady Hesketh, drew out all his powers. He could tell her the minutest details of his Olney life; he could freely confide to her the touching incidents of his own melancholy history, and at the same time she was a kind and discerning critic of his poetical efforts. As he built up story after story of his poetical edifices, what so natural as to report progress to this dear cousin, and to find, or pretend to find, in her taste a canon which should regulate Eis performance? Then if she were absent-and if she were not there would be no occasion for a letter at all-how delightful to sketch schemes for a visit, to spend leisure hours in looking for a suitable abode throughout the wide extent of Olney, and to send off graphic pictures of this and that little room which would make a fitting residence for her ladyship when the summer came. Accounts of his advance in translating the Iliad and descriptions of Olney lodgings literally fill page after page of perhaps the most delightful part of his correspondence, and continue to give pleasure to thousands of readers now that the translation is forgotten, and the houses in Olney are, as we may presume, falling or fallen. It is the presence of this admired, this loved, this inspiring cousin that seems to float through the exquisitely-framed periods of the poet, and let all who can picture what such a cousin must be, confess that they do not wonder | perfect absence of studied effect and a more Cowper outshines himself when he writes to Lady Hesketh. Perhaps the greatest drawback to our pleasure in Cowper's letters is the display of vanity, a fault from which it is scarcely possible that any one should be free who acquires fame and lives in a village. Nothing but contact with the world can keep a successful author humble. Cowper tried conscientiously to smother an emotion he thought reprehensible, but it is easy to see that the snake is scotched and not killed. The imperfection of his attempts is apparent in his anxiety to impress upon his correspondents that he is utterly careless of literary success. He describes himself as a writer sans reproche, a bright example to the tribe, a man proof against the stings of sarcasm and the whispers of flattery. And perhaps in the next sentence he tells us that Olney laurels are worthless, but that he may perhaps mention what my neighbor Mr. So-and-so has said of The Task, or he acknowledges with fervent gratitude any scrap of favorable criticism which his correspondent has communicated to him. These are the smallnesses which creep over almost every recluse, and we may say of the life of a genius in a country circle what Touchstone remarks of his shepherd's life, that "in respect that it is solitary it may be liked very well, but in respect that it is private it is a very vile life." There is in this as in other ways an absence of thorough self-dependence, force, and energy, manifested in Cowper's letters, that contrasts unfavorably with Gray's resolute, reserved, dignified bearing. But with this allowance we see no deduction that has to be made in speaking of Cowper as a perfect letter-writer. The grace of his English is magical; it seems hardly possible that a writer should have had such language at command without any apparent exertion requisite for its production. There is a more sustained felicity of language in Cowper than in Gray. Cowper, too, writes from a home, with far more of domestic feeling and domestic interest than was possible for the isolated student at Cambridge. This lends a charm to correspondence, the absence of which it is not easy to compensate. Cowper's letters will always be the more popular, and if we wished to show a stranger to the literature of the last century how letters can be written, we should refer him to a chosen volume of Cowper's correspondence. There With Cowper our list is closed. were many of his contemporaries, and there have been many since, who have written letters that are full of all that makes letters delightful. But so far as they may have been unconsciously acted on by the notion of letter-writing as an art worked out by, and handed down through, a series of successive artists, they may be represented by Cowper as far the most eminent and skilful of them. After the time of Cowper the art of letterwriting may be said to have quickly perished. How this happened must be obvious to any one who reflects on the change undergone towards the close of the century throughout the whole structure of society, and on the causes, political and moral, that conduced to this alteration. Society changed, and the art that suited and belonged to the old society did not suit the new. That we can thus fix the end as well as the beginning of the period within which the art flourished, makes it much easier to ascertain the relation it bore to the general character of the times. We have been forced by the narrow limits of our space to treat this relation in a somewhat cursory manner, but we are convinced that the more closely the subject is examined, the more clearly will the correspondence of its great letter-writers be recognized as exponent of much that was most peculiar in the eighteenth century. an LITERARY LABOR.-The American author,, Alcott, has written 100 volumes; Wesley wrote 30 octavo volumes; Baxter wrote several hundred volumes; and Lopez de Vega, the Spanish poet, published 21,300,000 lines, which is equal to more than 2,660 volumes as large as Milton's Paradise Lost! Lopez de Vega was the most voluminous of writers. But it is not the quantity so much as the quality of literary matter that insures immortality, for long after the millions of Lopez de Vega's lines are buried in oblivion, the few simple verses of Gray's Elegy will live to delight mankind. From Sharpe's Magazine. 'A TALK ABOUT NEWSPAPERS. to the beginning of the eighteenth century, It THE modern civilized man, in England, or to imagine what possible use a man could France, or America, regards his newspaper have for such an " intolerable deal" of close as the most important and necessary of the print, as people now-a-days are in conceiving individual contributories to his comfort. How-how it could have been dispensed with. Up ever devoted he may be to pleasure, indolence, or luxury, it is very probable that he would sacrifice any one particular indulgence which could be named, rather than consent to be deprived permanently of access to a newspaper. The journal is in truth become a necessary of daily life-of nearly as much consequence as the quality of the food we eat; of much more consequence than the fashion of the clothes we wear. In like manner, with some other artificially created necessities, it seems to have become more essential to men's comfort than those pointed out by nature. Water and bread are plainly indicated by nature as staffs and essentials to life; but we will answer for it, that nineteen out of twenty citizens, gentlemen, and Englishmen of all ranks above the very meanest, would dispense with bread and water, that is to say, would put up with any one of the substitutes therefor devised by cookery, rather than lose their newspaper, or submit to any material falling off in the amount and variety of its contents. Yet this all-important necessity of the nineteenth century is a thing almost wholly of our own day-it scarcely dates from yesterday in the great roll-book of time. The father of a man with a round score years of life now before him, may have been living at a time when a daily newspaper was unknown; nay, a very, very old man-an old Parr or Henry Jenkins-living as this essay is penned, may have been born before the first number of the Daily Courant (the earliest daily newspaper), consisting of a single page of octavo (not printed on the back), appeared. How folks managed before newspapers were published, forms a somewhat puzzling conjecture to a man who lives in the odor of the dailies, tri-weeklies, weeklies, and monthlies which now so abound. But that they did manage to get on without the ever-recurrent broadsheets is certain enough; and they would probably have been as much puzzled Many of our readers have doubtless been amused with anecdotes of "the first English newspaper." The English Mercurie, which that fond discoverer of mares'-nests--that most laborious and most credulous of literary antiquaries, George Chalmers, so enthusiastically attributes to "the genius of Elizabeth, and sagacity of Burleigh." The way in which the mistake happened was as follows:-Poking about in the labyrinthal recesses of the old British Museum, Mr. Chalmers alighted on a volume containing some printed papers bearing the 'title of The English Mercurie, and purporting to have been printed in 1588, during the crisis of the Spanish Armada alarm, and to contain accounts of the earlier conflicts between our admirals and the enemy. Chalmers, who was a man of unusually capacious "swallow" for any thing novel or surprising, jumped at the bait, and published his wonderful discovery, which was too hastily taken for granted by the elder D'Israeli and other British writers of note, and from them by literary men abroad, until the English Mercurie became quite a clerum et venerabile nomen as the precursor of that mighty organ, the newspaper press, all over the world. Great, therefore, was the astonishment, and not less the reluctance, with which, after forty or fifty years' currency, the discovery turned posed on by Mr. Chalmers's "discovery," observes, I witnessed fifty years ago that laborious researcher (George Chalmers) busied along the long, dusty shelves of our periodical papers, which then reposed in the antechamber of the former reading-room of the British Museum. To the industry which I had witnessed I confided, and such positive and precise evidence could not fail to be accept out to be a delusion, and the English Mer- | curie a forgery of the most impudent kind. It was not even a dexterous or clever forgery; it was as clumsy and palpable a piece of botching as ever was seen. A man of average care and perspicacity, which Chalmers was not when his antiquarian enthusiasm was inflamed, would have detected the fraud in an instant. The paper and printing of the documents turned out to be of the eighteenth, noted of all. In the British Museum, indeed, the sixteenth century. The orthography and other matters of detail contain internal evidences of the attempt, and frequent failure, of a modern forger to simulate ancient peculiarities; and the pretended items of news contained blunders about dates and places, which could not possibly have been made by a contemporaneous writer. The very manuscripts from which some of the "numbers" had been evidently printed were found, and the paper on which it was written bore the water-mark of the royal arms, with the initials "G. R." they held up to the admiration of their readers, is a circumstance which suggests the necessity of caution as a general rule in the recognition of "venerable relics" of the kind. George Chalmers found the printed English Mercurie; but there also, it now appears, he might have seen the original, with all its corrections before it was sent to the press, written on paper of modern fabric." The truth is, the " positive and precise evidence" was accepted by all," merely because it was not tested, and, being a lie, circumstantiated; and, moreover, being just one of the kind which people would feel more pleasure in believing than in disbelieving, went down with much unction. If it had been one less palatable and interesting, it would have been scarcely To Mr. Thomas Watt, whose name is well accepted on the mere opinion of Mr. Chalknown in association with the British Museum, mers. That it should have gone on so long belongs the merit of having detected this, imposing on the world, described so minutely one of the most flagrant frauds, though for on hearsay by antiquarians living within halfa long time one of the most successful, in the an-hour's walk of the Museum, but who did history of forgery. It had passed into ac- not think it necessary to step in there and ceptance all over the world; and in the cy-pass a few minutes in examining that which clopædias of every nation, from St. Petersburg to Madrid, from Warsaw to Washington, might be found articles mentioning the "venerable English Mercurie, or the patriarch of printed Journals." It was by the merest chance, while prosecuting another inquiry, that Mr. Watt happened to consult its veracious pages, and he saw through the imposture at once. Like many other objects of curiosity, it had previously been more written about and described than inspected, and had thus escaped detection. Subsequent inquiries rendered it probable that the forgery originated in a whim of the second Lord Hardwicke, who, it is to be hoped, for the sake of his memory, intended it merely for a toy to amuse or mystify his private friends for a while, and then be cast aside. The nobleman in question died suddenly, perhaps before he had time to show the paper, and to explain the manner of its "getting up;" and so, at last, it found its way, with other books and manuscripts, amongst which it was overlooked, to the British Museum, whence it, in course of time, was unearthed, and dragged into false repute by the plodding and dupeable Chalmers. Mr. D'Israeli, in explaining a little before his death the way in which he, in common with all the literati of his time, had been im The real date of the first newspaper appears, beyond all doubt, to belong to the reign of King James the First; and the patriarch of the extensive and important family of journalists was Nathaniel Butler, who, having long plied the avocation of a writer of manuscript letters, or packets of news, to persons who paid him for his trouble, hit off the idea of printing such intelligence periodically, and selling it to all comers for a fixed sum. Occasional sheets of "news" of a status almost equal to that of those which in our days are sometimes, on the occurrence of a remarkable murder or execution, hawked about the streets for a halfpenny, were known before this time; but he and his associates were the first periodical chroniclers in print. The speculation was called The Weekly News, and appeared in May, 1622; numerous rivals soon started up to compete with it, and the little flimsy periodical sheets, seldom or never consisting of more matter than is contained in half a page of Sharpe's Magazine, were pretty freely circulated during the reign of James, though the works of certain poets and dra |