"Pope," she continues, "has triumphantly | between those most intimately connected declared that they may do and say what- There was a want of force in the artless com ever silly things they please, they will still munications of the French lady, and she fel be the greatest geniuses nature ever exhib- a desire for something of the vigor an ited.". There was undoubtedly something point that characterized her own mode o of pique in her sentiments on the subject, writing. and she was a good hater; and, hating the wits for Pope's sake, loved to sting them when she could. There was also a feeling of apprehension, not unnatural to one born within an exclusive circle, lest the barrier of that circle should give way if the intrusion of literary eminence were permitted. "It is pleasant," she tells her daughter, "to consider that, had it not been for the goodnature of those very mortals they contemn, these two superior beings (Pope and Swift) were entitled by their birth and hereditary fortune to be only a couple of link-boys.' But we must also add that, though she derived more than she was pleased to own from the men she thus sneered at, she was perfectly right in protesting against the enervating influence of Pope and Bolingbroke upon those who used their style as a means, not of conveying thought, but of concealing the absence of it. "Smooth lines," she protests, in indignation at the court paid by Lord Orrery to Pope's circle, "have as much influence over some people as the authority of the Church in those countries where it cannot only excuse, but sanctify any absurdity or villany whatever." Lady Mary was equally determined in her disapproval of another model of easy writing, and one whose charms have hitherto defied time and a complete change of manners and tastes. She could not endure Madame de Sevigné. She even carries her adverse opinion so far as to assert that Madame de Sevigné only gives, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, "mean sentiments, vulgar prejudices, and endless repetitions; sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady, sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittletattle yet well gilt over by airy expressions and a glowing style." She seems to have been insensible to that which constitutes the great fascination of Madame de Sevigné's letters, the faithfulness and simplicity, and at the same time the truth with which home scenes are painted, and the manner in which the reader is transported to the interior life of a family, and made as it were an inmate of the house. Lady Mary treated this as a violation of the rules of good taste; there was not sufficient reserve, sufficient conscious ness of the necessity so often felt and acted on in society, of preserving a distance even

We may gather, then, that it was Lad Mary's aim to escape, in her letters, equall from all that was conventional and artificial as from what she thought paltry and twad dling minuteness; and her genius and assi duity enabled her to attain a style which leaves us hardly any thing to wish for. Sh makes the communication of facts persona to herself, and yet of a general interest, th groundwork of her writing. By doing so sh gained a great aid towards preserving hersel from the labored nothings that disfigure the letters of Pope; and the varied course of he life supplied her with a succession of persona adventures, the recital of which gave ampl scope for her powers of lively narration. Sh intersperses remarks abounding in sterling good sense, and allusions to individuals, al ways pointed and sometimes severe. The only defect that we have to notice is a certain hardness and dryness of thought and feeling though never of language. Even in the firs letters she wrote on her way to Constantino ple, when her marriage was still a recen event, we feel that, exquisite as is both the matter and the manner, there is something which betrays the coolness and way wardness of disposition that led her to separate from he husband and her daughter, and spend the las twenty years of her life in the solitude of ar Italian villa. But her letters are so perfect they are so shrewd, so easy, so entertaining and graceful, that it seems almost captious to find fault with any thing in them; and it is not only the great success which she attained in letter-writing, but the position she holds in the series of great letter-writers, that deserves to be remarked. On the one hand she acted as a stimulant, as a check, and, to some extent, an example to those in the literary world with whom she corresponded. Pope for instance, wrote what he considered his very best for her; and she elicited all that he was capable of in the particular line he considered most excellent. On the other hand, she contributed largely to diffuse through the aristocratic circles the notion that elegance in letter-writing was a desirable accomplishment. She may thus be looked on as the precursor of those who represent the next great stage of the art of letterwriting when it became the study, and received the impression, of the exclusive circles.

We must say, before parting from her, that she far outshone, in our opinion, those whom she thus preceded, and that neither Horace Walpole nor Lord Chesterfield ever produced a letter to be compared with the best of those which she sent from Constantinople and Italy.

made foul copies of his gossiping letters, he studied the French models, he collected stories, he stored up bon mots, he noted the whims, he treasured the oddities, and made a harvest of the follies of his contemporaries.

admire in Horace Walpole. He had not even a genuine love of good company, and an unaffected delight in the pleasures of society. He was but the caterer for the tastes. of those whom he thought it worth his while to please; and having provided a great variety of smart sentences and piquant stories, and having served them up with much tasteand discretion, he sends in his little account,. and expects immediate payment in flattery and social applause.

That his success was great no one can Horace Walpole has, perhaps, a greater pretend to deny. Looking at the art of letname as a letter wiiter than any other Eng. ter-writing from the point of view from which lishman. His letters are a valuable source of he regarded it, we must pronounce his letters historical information for a time with respect masterpieces of skill and ingenuity. But we to which information is scanty; and their live- suspect that few readers could sincerely avow liness, their point, wit, malice, gossip, and that they have not found them wearisome. store of anecdote make them pleasant reading We have the sensation after reading a few for those who have no relish for history. His dozen pages, as if we had been at a ball all wit does not seek to conceal itself, or if it night and were not allowed to go home to throws a veil over the means employed, it bed. All is unimpeachable in its elegance, affects no disguise as to the end desired. gayety, and effectiveness. But the music will He laid himself out honestly, indefatigably, keep jingling in our ears, and the lamps glarand openly, to be the letter-writer of his ing in our eyes, when we long for a backroom day. He has no real self to which he need and a rushlight. All writing that is produced pay the tribute of occasional recognition be- and adapted for a small and exclusive circle, neath the self which be paraded in court however it may dazzle and fascinate, must dress before the world. Pope and he both eventually tire us. There is nothing to like, wrote letters as a serious business, in the and, apart from his skill in reflecting the feeleffective discharge of which their reputationings and wishes of his associates, nothing to was involved; but they viewed their business in a very different light. Pope, as we have said, sought to establish a neutral ground on which the man of letters and the man of fashion might meet. Horace Walpole aimed only at delighting, amusing, and satisfying the portion of the fashionable world with which he was acquainted. He writes from within the circle which bounds his ambition. He perceived that a style of composition which should be on paper what the conversation of their circle was, if taken at its best, in spoken words, would be closely akin to the aspirations of those with whom he lived, and whom he sought most anxiously to please. Letter-writing in his hands was the written voice of the gay world, and of the most educated and witty of its members. He embraced all that world approved, and nothing it shunned. He did not, like Pope, ask it to make concessions; he did not employ its polished language to express independent thought, keen observation, and original reflection, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He wished to think as his world thought, to write as it wrote, but to give his thoughts a scope, and his language a grace which that world could permit and appreciate. He felt that he could make a new toy for his playmates, and he knew how society pets and rewards its toymakers; and to make the pretty gilded structure, he racked a fer

1

Examples serve but very feebly to illustrate his peculiar manner, as it is by a combination of little things well put together, and not by the excellence of detached passages, that his letters impress us. He dovetails his mosaic so skilfully, that we are struck with admiration at the work when completed, but each component fragment is nearly worthless by itself. All that we can arrive at by the most careful examination of his style, is the more accurate perception of the labor and the success with which he aimed at writing as fine folks talk. It is true that French letter-writing has so far furnished him with an example, that his style has in some measure the appearance of being borrowed and not original. But he borrowed because what he thus acquired was the most ready aid he could have in the task he set himself. Paris gave the laws of society to the circle in which he moved, and he was too

wise to neglect the obvious eid to be derived

|

1

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.

His

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.

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 ambi tious of its supremacy; there is no humoring Gray was neither wholly in the world nor of the caprices of a narrow set--no seeking wholly out of it. He wrote from the calm to devise means how a system, philosophi- retreat of a Cambridge college, but he had cally commented on, may be sustained and personal friends who mixed in the busy and preserved in its integrity. At the same the fashionable world, and he himself occatime the writer does not write like one of a sionally quitted his retirement to spread his careless generation, anxious to save the tenth wings in the gayety of the metropolis. post of the day, and inclosing in an adhesive letters reflect his manner of living. They envelope, the crude thoughts and hasty ex- are full of the savoir vivre which can only pressions he blots upon a sheet of note-paper be attained by intercourse with society, and the size of a crown-piece. These artless yet they bear constant witness to the digniartists, these consummate performers of thefied reserve of the literaly recluse, and 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 å 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

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