There are certain handy phrases, the legal-tender of conversation, that people generally use without troubling themselves to look into their title to currency.  It is often said, for instance, with an air of deploring a phase of general mental degeneracy, that “letter-writing is a lost art.”  And so it is,—–­not because men nowadays, if they were put to it, could not, on the average, write as good letters as ever (the average although we certainly have no Lambs, and perhaps no Walpoles or Southeys to raise it, would probably be higher), but because the conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely passed away.  With our modern facility of communication, the letter has lost the pristine dignity of its function.  The earth has dwindled strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation used to Mr. Edison’s devices, Puck’s girdle presents no difficulties to the imagination.  In Charles Lamb’s time the expression “from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s” meant something; to-day it means a few comfortable hours by rail, a few minutes by telegraph.  Wordsworth in the North of England was to Lamb, so far as the chance of personal contact was concerned, nearly as remote as Manning in China.  Under such conditions a letter was of course a weighty matter; it was a thoughtful summary of opinion, a rarely recurring budget of general intelligence, expensive to send, and paid for by the recipient; and men put their minds and energies into composing it.  “One wrote at that time,” says W.C.  Hazlitt, “a letter to an acquaintance in one of the home counties which one would only write nowadays to a settler in the Colonies or a relative in India.”

But to whatever conditions or circumstances we may owe the existence of Charles Lamb’s letters, their quality is of course the fruit of the genius and temperament of the writer.  Unpremeditated as the strain of the skylark, they have almost to excess (were that possible) the prime epistolary merit of spontaneity.  From the brain of the writer to the sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream.  Lamb, at his best, ranges with Shakspearian facility the gamut of human emotion, exclaiming, as it were at one moment, with Jaques, “Motley’s the only wear!”—­in the next probing the source of tears.  He is as ejaculatory with his pen as other men are with their tongues.  Puns, quotations, conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness, chase each other over his pages like clouds over a summer sky; and the whole is leavened with the sterling ethical and aesthetic good sense that renders Charles Lamb one of the wholesomest of writers.

As to the plan on which the selections for this volume have been made, it needs only to be said that, in general, the editor has aimed to include those letters which exhibit most fully the writer’s distinctive charm and quality.  This plan leaves, of course, a residue of considerable biographical and critical value; but it is believed that to all who really love and appreciate him, Charles Lamb’s “Best Letters” are those which are most uniquely and unmistakably Charles Lamb’s.