Perhaps no one operation of frequent recurrence and absolute necessity
involves so much mental pain and imaginative uneasiness as the reduction
of thoughts to paper, for the furtherance of epistolatory correspondence.
Some great key-stone to this abstruse science--some accurate data from
which all sorts and conditions of people may at once receive instruction
and assistance, has been long wanting.
Letter-writers, in general, may be divided into two great classes, viz.:
those who write to ask favours, and those who write to refuse them. There
is a vague notion extant, that in former days a third genus
existed--though by no means proportionate to the other two--they were
those who wrote "to grant favours;" these were also remarkable for
enclosing remittances and paying the double postage--at least, so we are
assured; of our knowledge, we can advance nothing concerning them and
their (to us) supposititious existence, save our conviction that the race
has been long extinct.