read in full consistory (there were no newspapers in those times); and as for the lady, if she could have known when she was writing, that her éloquence épistolaire would be confided to the discretion of even a remote posterity, we suspect she would have thought twice before she committed her secret to the keeping of the postmaster-general.

There are certain physiologists who entertain considerable alarm at the influence of tea and coffee on the nervous system, and who are constantly predicting the worst possible consequences to our over-excited organs, from the use of these stimulants. To such persons, the diminution of postage must be a source of additional uneasiness, on account of its tendency to open new veins of sentimentality, and to coincide with novel-reading in raising the imaginations of the lieges above concert pitch. Schoolmistresses, too, will exclaim against the additional obstruction thrown in the way of their scholars' studies; and fancy that as two dry sticks rubbed against each other will kindle a flame, so the friction of two romantic correspondents, when possessing such increased facilities of movement, may engender heats by no means consonant with the moral health and discipline of their seminaries. To all such alarmists we would suggest that the quantity of letter-writing depends not merely on its pecuniary cost, but varies also with the quantity of ideas; and we recommend them to consider the letter-box rather in the light of a waste-pipe for conveying away the superfluous accumulation of romantic notions, than as an engine for their development. The charge is already there in its maximum intensity, and in quantity more than sufficient to exhaust the largest post-office accommodations.

But perhaps the element of letter-writing, which will occasion the greatest alteration in existing arrangements, is time. The faculty of doing two things at once is enjoyed by so very few, and under such close restrictions, that we cannot contemplate any great increase in the epistolary circulation of the kingdom, without looking for a corresponding diminution in other accustomed employments. To our friends, the publishers, more especially, this is a matter for grave consideration. They have but too much reason to expect a "forthcoming" deduction in their subscription-lists, as a consequence of cheap postage. As things at present are, we have often wondered how the public finds time to read its letters, and keep up with the literature of the day; but if every man of us must receive and answer six times our actual correspondence (nay, if it be but four), reading any thing else will be almost wholly out of the question. Without fear of exaggeration, we may say that it will be all over with double-sheeted newspapers, that novels must drop at least one of their obligatory three volumes, and that quartos must perish from the face of the earth. Our comfort is in the brevity of our own lucubrations, which if it does not warrant a hope that the New Monthly will ultimately survive the shock, will at least guarantee that we shall be the last to sink under it.

A class of persons who will probably benefit in the change, by a diminution of their labours, is that of members for popular boroughs, whose constituencies have hitherto kept them in full occupation. The privilege of the frank has set many a pen going, which will now be checked by "the small charge of one penny," laid on in advance; and we are credibly informed that the government contemplates a material reduction

of clerks in all the great offices, owing to the operation of this damper upon the patriotism of their volunteer correspondents. But (returning to members of parliament) we fear that whatever saving of time they may experience by a falling off in the epistolary activity of their constituents, will be more than compensated, by a necessity of adding to the length and frequency of their speeches in the house, in order to preserve themselves in the recollection of their electioneering friends; and this will be the more irksome, inasmuch as they will have a still smaller chance of being generally read, than they at present enjoy.

Among the consequences of an increased demand upon the time of the nation, by cheap postage, we contemplate with much pain the decline of many of the fine arts, which have hitherto occupied the leisure and adorned the persons of our fair countrywomen. To tambour-work, netting, knitting, knotting, and all sorts of embroidery, it can be little less than a deathblow; and we tremble to think of the hours which will be abstracted from the study of the pianoforte. The projected revival of cards, a circumstance so ardently to be desired, is evidently rendered impossible by this event; nor is it too much to say, that cheap postage will prove the one drop to overflow the bitter cup of theatrical managers, and afford the final and irrecoverable coup de grace, which following so close on Macready's secession, must despatch for good and all, that often slain and most respectable personage, the legitimate drama.

That the operations of trade itself will suffer considerable embarrassment from this cause, is much to be dreaded. Ledgers will cease to be posted, while clerks are pre-engaged in posting their own correspondence; market notes will be postponed for the composition of billetsdoux; manufacturers will be too occupied in receiving and acknowledging orders, to think of executing them. Coke and Blackstone, too, will be neglected for the complete letter-writer, and there will be no end of the youths

"Condemned their fathers' souls to cross,

And pen epistles when they should engross."

The Americans, we are told, are so pressed for time, that they can scarcely find leisure for swallowing their meals: may we not then add to the list of grievances, incident to this universal occupation of all mankind, in overloading the mails, the fact that the very cook-shops will experience a falling off in their customers, who will be henceforward too much occupied with writing, to eat their dinners deliberately and at length.

Every social evil, it may perhaps be said, brings with it its own remedy, which, in the long run, seldom fails to set all right: (the pity of it is, that this run is often so very long, as to put poor Patience terribly out of breath in following it). How far the curative efficacy may extend in the present case, we are not conjurers enough very clearly to foresee. But we may safely anticipate that the severe pressure upon the public time, occasioned by the necessity of fulfilling Mr. Hill's prognostics, will eventuate in the discovery of many abbreviations, both intellectual and manual, in the process of letter-writing; and this we take to be a consequence extending in its consequences far more widely than at first sight would be supposed. For if the Lacedemonians, under the influence of a little national vanity, succeeded in acquiring a knack of conversational

brevity, sufficient to form the basis of a proverb, what may not be expected from a constant and painful effort to overtake the post, running through all classes of society, and daily and hourly repeated. From the national habit of writing, not currente calamo (for that will be too much in the "slow coach" style to suit the emergency), but with some new Perryan patent pen, to be hit off to meet the occasion, and warranted to go at a railroad pace, may we not expect a total overthrow of the good old English deliberation of style (so much admired in our earlier writers), and look for an increased addiction to maxims and epigrams, which will make our very shopboys Rochefoucaulds, and our lawyers'-clerks Voltaires? Shakspeare has told us of an event that, "if it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly;" but how much more necessary will quickness of operation become when the end to be effected, like road-making, will be "never ending, still beginning." If a long-winded talker is the pest of society, a long-winded letter-writer will be put down by act of parliament; and the whole population will exert their best energies in rendering themselves so many Coltons, bringing back the English language to its primitive monosyllabic energy, and condensing their thoughts into the smallest number of these winged words. Critics and philosophers cannot have failed to observe, how far even a much smaller attack upon leisure has already operated in this way: the necessities of journalism have done more to shorten and to clear the style of writers of every class, than all the labours of professed reviewers put together. Your newspaper writer" pent up in the Utica" of half a column, and obliged to go to press before his ink is dry, has gradually acquired a habit of simple brevity and distinctness, which now extends to all other modes of authorship; and so the coxcomb who affects to distinguish himself by an elaborate and artificial mode of expression, is held up as an object of general ridicule, if he does not fail altogether in procuring a reading.

If so much has been effected by the labours of one small class in society, what must not be expected, when every boarding-school miss shall make a study of brevity! Five-act comedies already condensed into two-act farces, will henceforth be despatched in a single scene; sermons will be brought back to their original orthodox twenty minutes, and even parliamentary orators must be sustained by an increase of ideas; for it will be no longer allowable to talk for two hours together without a thought to communicate. Political holders forth after dinner, will also be restricted within more wholesome limits; and we shall, moreover, have a better chance of a liberal circulation of the bottle, than these eternal decanter-stoppers at present tolerate. We may calculate, too, upon a considerable saving in coat-buttons; the most deliberate prosers no longer finding it necessary to make a drag of those appendages, when they possess the power of shooting you flying, with an epigram, as you pass them in the street. We cannot help speculating also upon a notable improvement in the national morals, on the score of hypocrisy, when the language ceases to lend itself to the ponderous, balanced, and sustained sententiousness, so necessary for carrying on grave moral farces.

To judge of the abbreviating effects of cheap postage upon epistolary style, and to form a full estimate of the future, we have only to

look back on the past. There was an epoch, when post-offices did not exist, when letters were mostly confined to matters of state, and when none wrote but they who could afford to pay for a special express. Then it was that a letter was a serious matter; that the very putting down its elaborate direction" to my righte honourable, or righte worthy, my very singular and esteemed master and friend at his lodgings in Londone, &c.," occupied more time than is now put to the composition of a communication of several sheets. How tedious then was the surplusage of awkward and intorted phrases, used to clothe the plainest ideas!—how utterly wearisome the endless accumulation of unmeaning expressions of the individual's sense of his own worthlessnessthe fulsome exaltation of his correspondent's virtues and grandeurs! how abundant the indulgence in rigmarole of every description! Then came the winding up, the stiff, quaint, stately, hypocritical protestations of the love, respect, awe, duty, &c., of "the pore beadsman and oratour," who could scarcely bring himself to arrive at a definitive signature. Why, the very adjusting of the silk string that went to affix the seal, was a matter of forethought and contrivance, and must have thrown a dilatory colouring over all that preceded it. Tedious as such a process of letter-writing must in itself have been, it was necessarily still further protracted by the want of use. persons yet alive, who, from this cause alone, are compelled to meditate for a week before they call for paper and ink; and who, when they have screwed their courage to that sticking-place, expend more hours upon the composition of the much-dreaded task, than Lord Brougham would give to a volume of political sketches, or Lytton Bulwer to a fiveact drama.

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But if very great improvements took place in this matter, in the green of reform, what may not be expected under the high pressure of a penny postage? Every act and contrivance will be adopted for abridging the forms of correspondence, every ingenuity exerted to compress its substance. The "Poet of memory" will then cease to fret over the dropped pronoun at the head of his letter. Not only the complimentary my" so sensitively indicative of the state of the writer's affections, but the entire "dear sir" also will be abolished "at one full swoop." Nor let any one imagine that such dulcet flourishes are too insignificant for reform: a great mercantile house made a notable retrenchment in the article of ink, by not dotting their i's, nor crossing their t's; and a much more considerable saving must accrue in the clerkship hitherto devoted to an unmeaning circumbendibus of preliminary address. Men will therefore rush in medias res, and come at once to the matter in hand, all compliments and duties really "presupposed." A woman, too, will no longer, more suo, reserve her business for the postscript of her letters; since custom will absolutely proscribe such "more last words" in toto, as being, out of all endurance, 66 too tedious to mention." With the "sir," or the "gentlemen," at the head of the letter, will disappear the "humble servant to command," and the "by procuration for self and company" at its end. Many will be the moral consequences of such a change. Brevity and dryness of style will tend to produce a corresponding cynicism of feeling. Dunning letters, in dropping the preluding sweetnesses of “bad times," "great temporary distresses of trade," "bills to accept,"

and "unexpected losses," and in being reduced to a simple " pay me my bill or else," will react on the hearts of creditors, divesting them of pity and shame, and inviting them to a mode of action as brusque as their language. So also the most ceremonious invitations will dwindle into "dine with me on Wednesday," and the politest refusal will not extend beyond "can't come;" and it cannot be hoped that people will set much store by hospitalities thus briefly offered and lightly rejected. "Proposals, too, for matrimony," in being compressed into the pithy familiarity of "Will you marry me, dear Ally Croker?" will tend to diminish gratitude for the offer: and when the blushing fair shall hide her virgin emotions under the sufficing simplicity of "How much?" lovers may be shocked at the nakedness of the implied truth.

Another important social change involved in this saving, will be the downfal of diplomacy, thus stripped of its long-winded ambiguities, and of its sentences, which equally mean every thing or nothing. There will be no room for ulterior negotiation after a despatch which announces a great political event with the curt simplicity of the prizering, with its " Humphreys has done the Jew, by G-!"

To meet the new demands upon time in social life, much, no doubt, will be effected by the adoption of lithographed skeleton letters, to be merely filled up with the pen, as to their accidental particularities; with blanks for instance, for dates and sums, or in the case of marriage, announcements with spaces for the names of the parties. Such printed formulæ will be sold by the quire, and selections of subjects will be made up in sets; begging letters, borrowing letters, dunning letters, complimentary letters; letters for wives, husbands, friends, children; letters to constituents, and to country cousins, with counter sets of replies, to correspond.

One bad consequence will result from such doings, namely that we shall have no more Madame de Sevignés. The art of letter-writing in England owes much of its present perfection to the privilege of franking; but even the dolce far niente of the mansion or the villa will no longer stimulate to the covering of reams of note-paper, when such effusions must be paid for in advance, however low the tax, which may be laid on epistolary verbosity. What between those who will not pay for their own writing, and those who will be too busy to write, there will be a notable decay of that elaborate epistolary, "much ado about nothing," which makes the charm of aristocratic life. No more Horace Walpoles, then, for all time to come, with their prattle about Pattypan, and the wet-paperness of his friends and correspondents; no more of the delightful tittle-tattle of the Swifts to the M.D.'s. All the circumstances and relations of life will be reduced to an utilitarian simplicity. The letters of the lover will be as dry and as pithy as those of an attorney. A son's epistles to his father, will closely resemble a bill of exchange, a wife's to her husband, will be easily mistaken for an insolvent's schedule, and a proposition for elopement, will be a simple announce, that a chaise and a rope-ladder are in a state of promising forwardness.

For such a change the public is already somewhat prepared by the growing brevity of its vivá voce communications. "How do," and "How are you?" have long superseded the more sententious inSept.-VOL. LVII. NO. CCXXV.

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