Letters forms one of the most delightful branches of literature, and one moreover in which English possesses abundance of the finest examples. Most biographies that are now written contain the letters of the hero, and these usually open up his heart to the reader far better than pages of description of his qualities; while they also supply, by conscious or unconscious self-revelation, something of the peculiar interest that belongs to autobiography. But here may be remembered the warning words of Dr Johnson written à propos of Pope: 'There is no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse. In the eagerness of conversation the first emotions of the mind often burst out before they are considered; in the tumult of business interest and passion have their genuine effect; but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate by design his own character.' It is unhappily the fact that the conditions of modern life are generally unfavourable to the production of letters of the best class, which are the fruit of calm and ample leisure no less than of sympathy. The railway, the penny post, the telegram, and the postcard have combined to destroy letter-writing as a pursuit and an art. There is nowadays scarcely such a thing as correspondence in its good old sense—what Southey calls 'perhaps the greatest gratification which the progress of civilisation has given us; letters are only written when necessary, and consequently are too often completely impersonal and entirely uninteresting. Hence familiar letters, intimate and easy in tone, fluent and seemingly careless in style, have almost disappeared, and in their stead we have only the ephemeral, bald, disjointed, essentially unliterary, and it may even be ungrammatical productions, which, the moment their immediate purpose is served, are straightway consigned to the extinction for which they are fitted, and to which end indeed they were designed.'
Of letters Bacon says 'such as are written from wise men are of all the words of man, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations and public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches. So again letters of state from such as manage them, or are privy to them, are of all others the best instructions for history, and to a diligent reader the best histories in themselves.' Undoubtedly this is true, and the letters of such men as Cassiodorus, Cromwell, Marlborough, Nelson, Washington, and Wellington, as well as such vast collections as the Cecil Correspondence, and the like, will remain documents of the first importance to the historian; while the theologian will never cease to count the epistles of Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome among the richest sources available for a close study of the development of dogma and the movement of ecclesiastical history. Again, such collections as Pascal's Provincial Letters, Swift's Drapier's Letters, and the Letters of Junius only belong in a secondary sense to this department of literature, and lack the peculiar personal charm that belongs to such letters as those of Cicero, Horace Walpole, or Madame de Sévigné.
Of all the favourite letter-writers of the world Cicero is both the earliest and remains almost the greatest. More than 800 of his letters are extant; and all are natural, sincere, outspoken. The very frankness of his vanity and an almost feminine desire to please give a singular pleasure to his reader; and his own phrase in one of his letters—'fit enim nescio quid ut quasi coram adesse videar cum scribo aliquid ad te'—reveals in a single sentence the secret of his perennial charm. And he was singularly happy in a correspondent so sympathetic and intelligent as Atticus, to whom alone he sent as many as 400 letters, for Montaigne tells us how the want of such a judicious and indulgent friend to whom to address kept him from adopting the epistolary method for publishing his whimsies which otherwise he would have preferred. The only other important Latin letter-writers are Seneca and Pliny, but the one offends by prosy and tedious moralising, the other by a prolix and grandiose manner that soon proves tiresome.
The Paston letters, over 1000 in number, are lucid and unaffected and give us our best insight into the inner domestic life of the 15th century; but the earliest English letter-writer of high rank is James Howell, whose Familiar Letters shared with Montaigne the honour of being one of Thackeray's two 'bedside books.' Howell says 'familiar letters may be called the 'larum bells of love,' and elsewhere admirably describes his own compositions in the sentence—that's a true familiar letter which expresseth one's mind, as if he were discoursing with the party to whom he writes, in succinct and short terms.' Nowhere can we find more shrewdness, wit, wisdom, and keenness of observation, all combined with heartiness and sincerity; none knows better how to brighten his page with a merry quip or a lively story.
But our greatest letter-writers remain but three, or at most four: Gray, Horace Walpole, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Gray's work is fastidious, precise perfect, but never laboured, and always completely sincere. It suggests the finished scholar unbending to please a friend, and the perfection is a consummation that came of itself, unstudied and unsought. Pope and Bolingbroke wrote for fame—their writing ever suggests an intellectual exercise, and even the letters between Pope and Swift are never entirely free from consciousness; but Gray wrote for love, and his letters, with those of Cowper and Charles Lamb, stand by themselves. Horace Walpole said of himself that he lived 'a life of letter-writing,' and he remains pre-eminent alike in the number and the remarkable felicity of his letters. He is by turns gay, good-humoured, piquant, keen, sarcastic, but is always clever and often even genial, although not seldom the reader detects the presence of effort and affectation. Still, all defects apart, judged in respect of both quantity and quality, and of the extraordinary range of subjects handled, he remains without a rival the prince of English letter-writers.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters are unusually lively, clever, and amusing, but are marred by a constitutional indelicacy of tone as well as a vanity and a consciousness of skill that will not hide. Chesterfield's letters to his natural son show great shrewdness and powers of observation in a finished if over-elaborated style, but reveal a moral meanness of view that stamps the finished man of the world as but a sorry gentleman. The letters to his godson, written in later life, and first published by the late Lord Carnarvon in 1889, show a higher tone, but are poor performances if judged from the point of view of letters written to a child. The letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple are delightful beyond most; those of Sir William himself, so long admired as models of serene and stately English, have ceased to interest the modern reader. But Lady Rachel Russell's letters, the apologetic scraps written by Steele to his wife Prue, and Swift's letters to Stella preserve a charm that defies the touch of time. Other 18th-century letters of interest are those of Mrs Delaney, covering half a century, Fanny Burney, Miss Berry, one of Walpole's later correspondents, and Hannah More. Dr Johnson's letters are always admirably vigorous and direct, and one at least is among the most memorable things in English literature; but he never put his strength into this form, and indeed disliked to write freely in letters from the after-use that might be made of them. Jane Austen's letters are not characteristic of her unique genius; Burns's are artificial and disappointing; Sterne's mawkish and unreal; Goldsmith's good, but few and unimportant. But the century closes well with the inimitable masterpieces of Cowper, throughout full of tenderness, grace, vivacity, wit, and sense.
Of 19th-century letters the characteristic examples of Charles Lamb stand first. Even the slightest show the peculiar charm of his touch, and all are stamped with the sign-manual of genius. Scott's letters are hearty, genial, and honest; Byron's clever, trenchant, and somewhat unreal. There are many good letters of Southey, Crabbe, Sydney Smith, Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, Lockhart, Macaulay, Dr Arnold, Hood, Washington Irving, Emerson, Carlyle, Lady Duff Gordon, and Ruskin. Thirlwall's Letters to a Friend, and Thackeray's Letters, published in 1887, are unusually good collections. Shelley is an author not yet judged sensibly by either set of readers, but it is enough to say of his letters that they are neither so much above his poetry as Matthew Arnold would place them nor as far below it as they appear to Mr Swinburne. The letters of Mary Godwin to Imlay, written towards the close of the 18th century, are deeply interesting; those of Keats to Fanny Brawne do injustice to the memory of a sovereign poet, and should never have been printed. But indeed the love-letter is almost always a flower that will not bear being plucked from the stalk on which it grew, and those that are nowadays too often read aloud in breach-of-promise cases are almost always as unreal as the short-lived passion that inspired them. Of later 19th-century English letters none stand out greater than those of Mrs Carlyle and Edward Fitzgerald, which have indeed already been lifted into the rank of the English classics in this kind.
Of German letter-writers it may be enough to name Schiller, Goethe, and Humboldt; of French, Voiture, Madame de Maintenon, Madame du Defland, Sainte-Beuve, George Sand, Merimée, and the unapproachable name of Madame de Sévigné. The sovereign quality of this great letter-writer is her naturalness and goodness of heart, combined with an unmatched facility of sympathetically realising the emotional experiences of others, and of adding reality and life to everything she touched. None ever possessed in richer measure the woman's gift of that warmer interest in the smaller commerce of life, and that aptitude for treating social or public matters from the private and personal point of view which give half their charm to the letters of women. She tells her daughter, to whom she wrote with overflowing affection for twenty-five years, that she lets her pen 'run on and take its own way. . . . I commence always without knowing how far I shall go; I know not whether my letter will be long or short.' Horace Walpole says of her, 'She has the art of making you acquainted with all her acquaintance, and attaches you even to the spots she inhabited.' There is no writer whose inherent goodness has been repaid with a warmer love than Madame de Sévigné, or whose supremacy upon an intellectual throne is less likely ever to be shaken.
The English reader will find the form of the ancient Roman letter in the example preserved in Acts xxiii. The modern English letter differs from the older only in being somewhat less ceremonious and less varied in form. Thus, 'sir' alone was once nearly universal as the form of address, but is now considered cold. Again, 'honoured sir' and 'respected sir' have almost disappeared, and unhappily also such beautiful forms as 'heart' and 'sweet-heart.' Howell often ends with 'yours inviolably,' 'yours entirely,' 'yours in no vulgar way of friendship,' Horace Walpole says 'yours very much,' 'yours most cordially,' and once, to Hannah More in 1789, 'yours more and more.' Puritan writers often used forms strange to modern ears, such as 'yours in the bowels of Christ.' Baxter in his certain epistolare with Peter Heylin delightfully subscribes himself 'yours in so far as you are for the truth.' In earlier times it was customary to add on the outside directions to the bearer, as 'Haste, haste,' and in official letters even such pointed provocatives of speed as 'Ride, ride, for your life.' Underlining is a detestable practice, equivalent to a confession of weakness in being forced to borrow strength from adventitious aid, and crossing is a device happily practised by but few men at least, although it had its use in days of dear postage. Many, however, indulge in a postscript, without which it is said no lady's letter is complete.
The earliest guide to letter-writing extant is Angel Day's English Secretary (1599). Another, by Gervase Markham, is entitled Conceited Letters; or a most Excellent Bundle of New Wit (1618). Forms of letters, with much else, were also given in the popular Academy of Compliments (1671). Of such books there is now great abundance; but, while occasionally helpful, they are by no means an unmixed blessing, being no doubt responsible for many ridiculous phrases that are in too common use. But to them the world owes the masterpieces of Richardson, who, in his labours upon a guide to correspondence, discovered that he could write novels that could melt the hearts of the women.
See William Roberts, History of Letter-writing, from the Earliest Period to the Fifth Century (1843); Charles Knight, Half-hours with the best Letter-writers and Autobiographers (two series, 1867-68); George Seton, Gossip about Letters and Letter-writers (1870); W. Baptiste Scoones, Four Centuries of English Letters (1880); and Robert Cochrane, The British Letter-writers (1882). The two last books are excellent collections, full, yet admirably selected. There is a collection of Love Letters of Famous Men and Women of Past and Present Centuries (2 vols. 1888) by Mr Merydew. The copyright of letters remains with the writer (see COPYRIGHT).