VI. The Highlanders of Scotland, their Origin, History, and An- tiquities; with a Sketch of their Manners and Customs; and an Account of the Clans into which they are divided, and of the VII. National Education; the Question of Questions. X. Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages. The Merchant and THE EDINBURGH REVIEW. OCTOBER, 1837. N CXXXIII. ART. I.--The Letters of Charles Lamb,with a Sketch of his Life, BY THOMAS NOON TALFOURD, one of his Executors. 2 vols. 12mo. London : 1837. THIS HIS is one of the most delightful additions to literary biography that has appeared since the publication of Hayley's Life of Cowper.' It is compiled with as much judgment as affection (a combination equally wanted in both cases), and is fortunately composed almost entirely from similar materials-private letters. Before proceeding farther, we shall take leave to premise few words on the characteristic qualities of a good letter. a A correspondence is a conversation. The few rules which can be laid down with regard to either subject or style apply equally to both. Sir James Mackintosh was a great master of conversation; and the remarks suggested to him by the letters of Madame de Sevigné are universally true. Letters must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley's letters on her journies to Constantinople, are an admirable 'book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to 'discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another, to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to 'be occupation, nor must letters.' A moment of enthusiasm, a burst of feeling, a flash of eloquence, may be ⚫ allowed; but the intercourse of society, either in conversation or in letters, allows no more. Though interdicted from the ' long-continued use of elevated language, they are not without VOL. LXVI. NO. CXXXIII. A 6 a resource. There is a part of language which is disdained by the pedant or the declaimer, and which both, if they knew its difficulty, would dread: it is formed of the most familiar phrases and turns in daily use by the generality of men, and is full of energy and vivacity, bearing upon it the mark of those keen feelings and strong passions from which it springs. It is the employment of such phrases which produce what may be called colloquial eloquence. Conversation and letters may be thus raised to any degree of animation, without departing from their character. To meet this despised part of language in a polished dress, and producing all the effects of wit and eloquence, is a ⚫ constant source of agreeable surprise: this is increased when a few bolder and higher words are happily wrought into the texture of this familiar eloquence; to find what seems so unlike author-craft in a book, raises the pleasing astonishment to its highest degree.' * Accordingly, a record of the best conversatious, and a collection of the best letters, must form a species of literature quite different from all others-different in subjects, different in style. The diversity is broad enough to produce and support talents and pleasures peculiar to itself. So infinite are the niceties which govern the operations of the human mind, that there are some men whose faculties appear to leave them on taking up a pen ; others to become half inspired. Even in a case so similar as a conversation and a letter, there is no telling beforehand. Fox used to make Dr Lawrence put on paper what he wanted to tell him, saying, 'I love to read your writing, I hate to hear you 'talk.' With This species of literature is in a great measure new. regard to conversations, we have only one cast that we know of, taken from the living countenance—the portrait of the Johnsonian circle by Boswell. The difficulty is so great of fixing or carrying away that kind of lights and shadows-so much of the dramatic effect depends on the voice and look and manner and occasion, all of which are, of course, lost on paper-that we do not wonder at the paucity of our specimens of the talk of even the most celebrated conversationalists. The specimens which we have are almost all too of one kind, the most portable class,— such as epigrams and pointed sayings. To judge by our comedies and novels, the skill required for inventing things-so slight, fresh, and natural, as successful conversation, is not much less rare than the power and opportunity of reporting them. With Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, vol. ii. p. 216. respect to private letters, few only can have any literary interest for the public; and of these, from many reasons, it is a small per centage which would, under any circumstances, ever see the light. But the truth is, that though we may suppose our ancestors to have conversed as much and as well as we do, they certainly corresponded less and worse: idle letters are modern luxuries; the last and kindliest fruits of our present civilisation. That they should be easily written and easily sent, were the conditions on which alone they could come into existence; and with these conditions neither antiquity nor the midle ages were able to comply. In the first place, but a certain proportion of the ladies and gentlemen of those times had learned to write; in the next, writing materials so cumbersome as to make every letter a parchment parcel, and communications so precarious and expensive, that the epistolary bundle must probably have to wait for a courier or a caravan, were obstacles sadly in the way of a frequent communing between absent friends. Among the old English collections, scarcely an instance will be found of a letter to which it would not be ridiculous to think of applying Mackintosh's criteria. Scholars appear to greater disadvantage even than their plainer neighbours. The one wrote on business, and thought of nothing more. The others wrote as artists, and, adopting false views of the nature of their art, went elaborately and perversely wrong. So little were critics aware of the specific literary merit appropriate to writings of this description, that Bishop Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, and a fair sample probably of the taste of his age, suppressed Cowley's familiar letters, the language of the heart,'-for the very reason which ought to have preserved them. the same traditional mistake, Pope wrote the things which he meant for letters, as little like real letters as his Homer is like the real Homer. It must surely be doing Pope great injustice to suppose that he would have talked to his friends in the way he wrote to them. Having no letters of Aspasia or Cornelia to turn to, we can say nothing of Greece or Rome. But the first good modern letters which any body knows of were written by women; and the best probably still are so. Women, saved from the pedantry of books, and cultivating the art of pleasing in the intercourse of society, were naturally the first to make the step. This consisted only in transferring to paper the graceful facility and freedom of their daily lives. The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague are as much superior to those of Pope, as are those of Madame de Sevigné to the letters of Voiture, Balzac, and St Evremond. Letter-writers are now better acquainted with the proper use of the instrument at their disposal; and the lovers of Under this kind of reading must expect no further help than is to be found in extension of education, and facility of carriage-in the schoolmaster, Mr Waghorn, and Mr Rowland Hill. Every improvement in the Post-Office will augment indefinitely the supply out of which this delightful supplement to modern literature must be derived. Our present state of society wants its realities to be confirmed, its individualities to be manifested, its domestic affections to be cherished. Towards all this, good letters in their several ways powerfully contribute. The art of a fiction is tried in the skill with which its selections and combinations from real life are made. The more that works of imagination are multiplied, the more desirable is it that we should be able to check the artist by a further and more extensive acquaintance with the realities themselves. How few novels deal faithfully with life - especially with the staple passion, love. Letters open to us the exigencies of life, and the differences of character, in the most unstudied and incidental manner. By means of them our knowledge of life, as it actually exists, with all its hopes and fears and sympathies, is as much enlarged as in the most successful fictions; and, necessarily, with a stronger conviction of truth than any fiction, after we are ten years old, can possibly command. How varied too!-The conversation of no two persons is exactly alike. No more will be their letters, upon the supposition that their letters are what we have said they ought to be-their conversation in another form. Of this we have excellent examples of our own. In Gray, we see the accomplished academic notwithstanding all his scorn of the University, gowned and formal still. In Walpole, all the malicious grace, with most of the weaknesses and vices of the period, and the circle in which he had been formed. The letters of Lord Byron are the free and dashing outpourings of himself— the tide rising over the banks, and laying under water streets and corn-fields with equal indifference. Such as he was, he appears before usa Don Juan of a higher order to be loved and admired, pitied and despised. The revelations of Cowper and Lamb, like those of Madame de Sevigné, are not less characteristic, and are of a more endearing kind. They take us to the sunny side of human nature, and show us life in its most attractive aspects the affectionate intercourse of devoted friends. While we read, the world without insensibly disappears. We see only in its stead some favoured spots, peopled by a happy race, with open arms and open hearts, who seem for the time to have little else to do, but to love and entertain, and somewhat spoil each other. The charm is so great that you are domesticated amongst them before you are |