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As for the barking of French papers, or of some second or third rate saloons, barkings thus magnified by American letter-writers, I know too much of Paris and of society to take notice of it. I am sure that the whole rebel tross in Paris, male and female, have not yet been admitted into any single saloon of the real good or high society in Paris, and never will be.
Pupils of the compilers of the Mishnah proceeded to Babylon to spread its influence, and they naturally maintained a correspondence with their chiefs in Palestine. Rab and Samuel in particular, among the Amoraim, were regular letter-writers, and Rabbi Jochanan replied to them. Towards the end of the third century this correspondence between Judea and Babylon became even more active.
Gray, as is above pointed out and as is also, with some provisos already made or very soon to be made, universally admitted, is one of our best letter-writers. But not everybody not every considerable man or woman of letters even can write good letters.
They are, however, usually superior to men in nimbleness and rapidity of thought, and in the gift of tact or the power of seizing speedily and faithfully the finer inflections of feeling, and they have therefore often attained very great eminence as conversationalists, as letter-writers, as actresses, and as novelists.
If you had read a book you very often criticised it: if you had been to any kind of entertainment you reported on it, etc. etc. Of course all this is still done by people who really do write real letters: but it is certainly done by a much smaller proportion of letter-writers than was the case two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago.
Has any of my readers many or any correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sévigné or like Lady Mary? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent.
Provisos and warnings may be taken as having been made sufficiently: and we pass to the actual survey. It may have been noticed in reference to the principal group of letter-writers in the eighteenth that, with the exception of Cowper, they were all acquainted with each other.
We can recall no published correspondence of the century which combines more excellent and diverse qualities than this with which Mr. Weiss has plentifully filled his pages. Occasions for which the completest of Complete Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion.
There are worse people in the world than Mrs. Dr. Matthews. Did he stay all winter and look about him and decide what to do? You know better than that. He sent his resignation in the very next Sabbath; and some of those letter-writers were hurt, and thought he had more Christian principle than that; and thought that ministers, of all men, should not be so hasty in their acts.
And indeed, as was soon discovered, the effective weapon of the insurgents lay in the very audacity of their plan. The scheme, as it existed in the mind of Gabriel, was as elaborate as that of Denmark Vesey, and as thorough as that of Nat Turner. If the current statements of all the Virginia letter-writers were true, "nothing could have been better contrived."