of his finest chapters. He was the last of the
true correspondents, and we shall not soon look upon
his like again. With all the contrivances for
increasing our speed of communication, and for enabling
us to cram more varied action into a single life, we
have less and less time to spare for salutary human
intercourse. The post-card symbolises the tendency
of the modern mind. We have come to find out
so many things which ought to be done that we make
up our minds to do nothing whatever thoroughly; and
the day may come when the news of a tragedy ruining
a life or a triumph crowning a career will be conveyed
by a sixpenny telegram. In the bad old days, when
postage was dear and the means of conveyance slow,
people who could afford to correspond at all sat down
to begin a letter as though they were about to engage
in some solemn rite. Every patch of the paper
was covered, and every word was weighed, so that the
writer screwed the utmost possible value for his money
out of the post-office. The letters written in
the last century resembled the deliberate and lengthy
communications of Roman gentlemen like Cicero:
and there is little wonder that the good folk made
the most of their paper and their time. We find
Godwin casually mentioning the fact that he paid twenty-one
shillings and eightpence for the postage of a letter
from Shelley; readers of The Antiquary will
remember that Lovel paid twenty-five shillings postage
for one epistle, besides half a guinea for the express
rider. Certes a man had good need to drive a
hard bargain with the Post Office in those pinching
times! Of course the “lower orders”—poor
benighted souls—were not supposed to have
any correspondence at all, and the game was kept up
by gentlemen of fortune, by merchants, by eager and
moneyed lovers, and by stray persons of literary tastes,
who could manage to beg franks from members of Parliament
and other dignitaries. One gentleman, not of
literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by
post; but this kind of postal communication was happily
rare. The best of the letter-writers felt themselves
bound to give their friends good worth for their money,
and thus we find the long chatty letters of the eighteenth
century purely delightful. I do not care much
for Lord Chesterfield’s correspondence; he was
eternally posing with an eye on the future—perhaps
on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly
said, “Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master
might write,” and he spoke the truth. Fancy
a man sending such stuff as this to a raw boy—“You
will observe the manners of the people of the best
fashion there; not that they are—it may
be—the best manners in the world, but because
they are the best manners of the place where you are,
to which a man of sense always conforms. The
nature of things is always and everywhere the same;
but the modes of them vary more or less in every country,
and an easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather
the assuming of them at proper times and proper places,