Morning journal and courier., 1891-11-17
The Art of Letter-writing.

Among our most venersted superstitions is the belief that letter-writing is a lost art, killed by telegraphs, postcards, frequent deliveries, and the hurried indolence of the ag,. If anybody seriously holds this opin- ion there are various ways in which he may be wholly or partially cured. In the first place, we may easily put ourselves almost in the position of our ancestors by think ing of our own letters to and from Eng land, India, Australia, or, for that matter, Samoa. They take longer on the road than in 1910, say, 8 letter took to go from Lon don to Edinburgh. They are addressed to people for whom we suppose ourselves to care, or they would not be written at all. Yet are they not a weariness to write, and very far from being a joy to read. We feel it a duty to get and give out pennyworths, and so it is not necessary to be long. We and our correspondents bestow all our te- dium upon each other in copious measure. Under the plausible pretext "all home news is welcome" we write things which it would hardly be worth the trouble to say.
 Now the truth is that our forefathers wrote letters of enormous length, but just as uninteresting as our own. We are de- ceived in our general estimate by having read only the best letters, those of Cicero, Mime. de Sevigne, Gray, Byron Horace Wal pole. To do Cicero justice, he was not that bore writer of long and verbose epistles. As for the others, they are the very pick and choice of letterwriters. The common run of correspondents were no more like them than the rejected poetry of the maga- zines is like that of Keats. In those old days people indited their familiar epistles on quarto, or even on folio, sheets of paper, ''and the number was hideous to sec" They wrote very close and small; the hands of ladies in particular ran away into an un- decipherable multitude of ms. A few, like Edgeworth, made praise-worthy efforts to be legible, but as rule the schrift, both of men and women, in the early part of the century, was puzzling in the highest degree. Only one or two ladies of rank and ability wrote in such form and well-shsped char acters as are now common in the cores pondence of women.
 It is not hard to understand how & man of Scott's energy kept up his own end of a voluminous correspondence; how he ever managed through the letters which he re- ceived is the real difficulty. In earlier days than our Underwriters, having opportuni- ties either few and expensive (and how won drous economical of postage they were), thought it positive duty to prose. They said at vast length everything which we now take for granted. They did not cut down an anecdote to its point, but sup piled it with contingent details, and hid it in a wildernes of trimmings. You pene- trated to his core after wandering in a jun gle of undecipherable verbisge. Any one who believes in the superstition about the l., o-& nf 1att xr-ill ha ral hr, course of studying old correspondence in the original schrift. He will see that, whereas we now come to the point at once if there is 8 point, and only say what is es: sential to be said, our forefathers and fore mothers wandered as tediously as the Is raelites through sapless desert of quarto paper. People who could really write well then were as rare-nsy, they were even more rare-than people who can really write now. A correspondent, like Charles Lamb, with a clear clerkly hand was very rare bird.
 Meanwhile one kind of correspondent is unchanged. The bore a hundred years since was just the bore of to-day. He in variably began by excusing his presump- tion. He always said ''You will doubtless be surprised at being addressed by 6 total stranger" He then went on, through his familiar circumlocutions,t to ask for money, for jobs that he wanted done, for favorable reviews for sn opinion about his confound- ed manuscript poems. He demanded un- important information which he could have found in any work of reference. He also offered uncalled- for information him self; he told his involuntary correspondent about many matters generally known. He was the son of the horse-leech that he still is, and prayed for g. .atuitous contributions to hopeless literary ventures. The only difference was that, as he had quarto or folio sheet to fill, he maundered at even greater length than he does to-day. For the rest, taking the common run of letter-writ- CTS, and excluding the famous exceptions, mankind were really duller and stupider, and infinitely more prolix letter-writers than there are in the present year of grace. They had less idea of when to stop, and the art of writing was far less generally under stood