production of letters by Shelley, Keats, and Byron. The market was
swamped by cleverly forged documents. About twenty years ago, Robert
Browning, the poet, edited a volume of letters by Shelley, and critics
said that they would prove useful to all future biographers of that
wayward genius. These letters turned out to be forgeries. One epistle
was found to be a ‘crib’ from an article by Sir Francis Palgrave, in
the ‘Quarterly Review.’ Another was slightly altered from a paper
in a literary annual. When research was made, the discovery ensued
that the supposed originals had been purchased by Mr. Moxon, the
publisher, at an auction. The auctioneer had had them consigned to
him by a bookseller in Pall Mall, and the bookseller had bought them
from two unknown women, who looked as much like ladies as the letters
looked like genuine productions. If Mr. Moxon had not sent a copy of
the volume to Mr. Tennyson a long time might have elapsed before the
fraud could have been discovered. But Mr. Palgrave, on a visit to the
Laureate, happened to open the book, and his eye fell on a letter from
Shelley to Godwin, written from Florence. Mr. Palgrave recognised in
it a portion of an article on Florence, in the ‘Quarterly,’ written by
his father, Sir Francis. Mr. Moxon called in all the copies of this
volume of pseudo-epistles, and suppressed the publication altogether.
A curious result has followed. The volume is worthless, but it is
rare; and simply on account of its rarity it is set down in a London
bookseller’s catalogue now before us at the price of 1_l._ 10_s._
Stray letters of Shelley continued to turn up in the market. Letters
to his wife, of the most confidential nature, containing aspersions on
his father, were bought by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son. These too
proved to be forgeries and were destroyed. Another letter, addressed to
Byron, and bearing Shelley’s signature, contained an assertion against
the fidelity of ‘Harriet.’ Whoever bought it paid six guineas for a
calumny against a dead and defenceless woman, to which was appended
the forged signature of her dead and defenceless husband. Forged
letters purporting to be from Byron are, as it were, to be had at every
turn. Also books with his alleged manuscript notes in the margin. Good
judges assert that these notes and letters are written with a thorough
knowledge of Byron’s life and feelings, and that the books are chosen
with the most perfect knowledge of his tastes and peculiarities.
There was once a dreadful fashion of writing romances and novels in
letters. Nothing seems more wearisome now, but they delighted the
age in which they were written, and _that_ says much for the patient
endurance of the readers of the period. There is, however, _one_ story
told in letters, the humour of which will never grow old, namely,
‘Humphrey Clinker.’ Smollett never showed more ability, or humour,
or power in delineating and discriminating character than in that
admirable work. For humour, commend us to the letters of Mrs. Tabitha
Bramble. The preciseness of that lady, who is satisfied if a suitable
reason be given for things she complains of, and who is drolly serious
in her logic, is charmingly illustrated in the following passage in
one of her various letters addressed to the housekeeper, Mrs. Gwyllym,
in the country, at Brambleton Hall: ‘You tell me the thunder has
soured two barrels of beer in the seller, but how the thunder should
get there, when the seller was double-locked, I can’t comprehend.
Howsomever, I won’t have the beer thrown out till I have seen it with
my own eyes. Perhaps it will recover. At least it will serve for
vinegar for the servants.’
This pretended letter is not beyond the reality of much letter-writing
of the last century. Southey, when collecting materials for
‘Espriella,’ came into possession of a letter from a farmer’s daughter.
It was written towards the close of the century, and it runs thus:
Dear Miss,--The energy of the races prompts me to assure you
that my request is forbidden, the idea of which I had awkwardly
nourished, notwithstanding my propensity to reserve. M. T. will
be there. Let me with confidence assure you that him and brothers
will be very happy to meet you and brothers. Us girls cannot go,
for reasons. The attention of the cows claims our assistance in
the evening.
UNALTERABLY YOURS.
In the days of heavy postage no one had the slightest scruple in
cheating the revenue. Persons leaving home, whether for inland or
foreign travel, were importuned by friends to carry letters for them
to other friends. An idea prevailed that, if the letters were carried
‘open’--that is, unsealed--there was no infraction of the law, and
that consequently no penalty could be exacted. This was a popular
error. The law, moreover, was evaded in another way. A newspaper was
sent by post in an envelope; inside the latter a long epistle was
often written in invisible ink, generally milk. When this was dry the
writing could not be seen. By holding the paper to the fire the writing
came out in a sepia colour, and the law was broken. The Post Office
authorities discovered this pretty trick, and parties were threatened
with prosecution; but as the receivers invariably protested that they
did not know who the senders were it was almost impossible to obtain
a conviction. Senders indeed grew a little nervous, and many changed
their method of conveying information in spite of the law. In place of
writing in milk on the covers of the newspapers they made slight dots
in ordinary ink under such printed letters as suited their purpose
for conveying intelligence. This was troublesome for both sender and
receiver, and it was therefore used only for brief messages. The postal
tax pressed most heavily on the poor, but the ingenious poor discovered
means to evade it. For instance, a son or daughter in town despatched a
letter to parents in the country who were too poor to pay the postage.
The parents declined to take such letter in, which they had legal right
to do. Returned to the General Post Office, the letter on being opened
was found to be a blank sheet of paper. The fact is that parents and
children had agreed to send these blank sheets as indications that
all was well with the sender; the receiver got that much of news and
had nothing to pay for it. The letter was never taken in unless a
particular mark was on the cover, which intimated that something of
importance was to be read within.
Although a high rate of postage fell most heavily upon the poor
there was scarcely anyone who did not feel it. Everyone wished to be
relieved from it. We can hardly realise how peers, who could frank
a large number of letters daily, and how members of Parliament, who
could frank, every day except Sunday, a few, were beset by friends for
franks for themselves, or for _their_ friends, or for their friends’
friends. We have an illustration of this fact in the ‘Diary, Letters,
and Journals of Sir George Jackson.’ Writing to his mother at Bath, in
1802, the then apprentice diplomatist says: ‘My sister tells me Bath
was never so thin. I sympathise with her, knowing how voluminous her
correspondence is, and that the thinness of Bath means “a dearth of
_frank_ men,” there being, she says, only Lords Rosslyn and Harcourt to
fly to.’
In those old days heavy postage made long letters. As the receivers
paid the postage they naturally expected their money’s worth. Often a
sheet of Bath post, or even of foolscap, was crossed and recrossed,
and not a hair’s breadth of the paper was left without its line. A
letter then was written bit by bit, day after day, till the whole was
completed. It was, in its way, a newspaper or a book; it was sent all
through the branches of a family; it was lent to friends; it even went
to mere acquaintances, and strangers made extracts from the choicest
parts of it. In the second series of Miss Mitford’s ‘Letters and
Correspondence’ she refers to one of these epistles. It was written by
a lord who had been travelling on the Continent, and it was a clever,
sensible, and instructive document. Miss Mitford borrowed it for the
purpose of copying the contents, to accomplish which cost her six
mortal hours, which the lady did not think were ill-spent.
When postage was high, letters were luxuries in which persons, far
above the condition of those who are called poor, could not often
indulge. We cannot give a better illustration of this than one we find
in a letter addressed by Mr. Collins, the artist, to his brother, in
1816, when the landscape painter was twenty-eight years of age. Collins
was then at Hastings sketching, and had invited his brother to come
down from Saturday to Monday. ‘The whole amount of the expense would be
the coach, provided you put two biscuits in your pocket, which would
answer as a lunch; and I would have dinner for you, which would not
increase _my_ expenditure _above tenpence_. I shall be at the place
where the coach stops for you, should you be able to come. Write me
nothing about it unless you have other business, _for a letter costs a
dinner_.’ This was the artist who was overjoyed to receive fifty pounds
for his ‘Cromer Sands,’ the picture for which, at the sale of the
Gillott collection, a purchaser was found to give, quite as joyously,
three thousand seven hundred and eighty guineas.
It has been said that, if heavy postage produced essays, cheap postage
makes epigrams. But the latter were not wanting in the very earliest
days. Nothing could be more epigrammatic than the note sent by one
Irish chief to another: ‘Pay me tribute, or else ----’ To which the
equally epigrammatic answer was: ‘I owe you none, and if ----’ Of this
sort were the notes between Foote’s mother and Foote. ‘Dear Sam,--I’m
in prison. Yours, E. FOOTE.’ The old lady was under arrest for debt.
The son’s answer was: ‘Dear Mother,--So am I. Yours, S. FOOTE.’ And
again, the letters between old Mrs. Garrick and young Edmund Kean:
‘Dear Mr. Kean,--You can’t play Abel Drugger. Yours, &c.’ To which
intimation Edmund wrote back: ‘Dear Madam,--I know it. Yours, E. K.’
Instances occur now and then where a joke has been played, the fun
of which was to make a man pay heavy postage for very unnecessary
information. When Collins, the artist, was once with some friends
around him, one of them resisted every attempt to induce him to stay
to supper. He withdrew, and the friends in council over their banquet
resolved that the sulky guest should be punished. Accordingly on the
following day Collins sent him a folded sheet of foolscap, in which
was written: ‘After you left we had stout and oysters.’ The receiver
understood what was meant, but he was equally resolved to have his
revenge. Accordingly, biding his time, he transmitted, in a feigned
hand, to Collins, a letter in which the painter read only, ‘_Had_ you?’
Therewith the joke seemed at an end; but Collins would have the last
word. He waited and waited till the thing was almost forgotten, and
then the writer of the last query opened a letter one morning in which
he had the satisfaction of finding an answer to it in the words, ‘Yes,
we had.’ We cannot dismiss this part of the subject without expressing
our regret that we are unable to remember the name of that British
admiral who, after achieving a glorious victory at sea, despatched a
letter to the Admiralty, in which there were only these or similar
words: ‘ ... Beat the enemy; took, sunk, burned, and destroyed ships
named in the margin.’ Tersest of admirals!
The publication of the letters of deceased persons first arose, or
began to be so common, about the middle of the last century, that Dr.
Arbuthnot declared the knowledge of such a fact added a new terror to
death. In 1781 the custom had not improved. ‘It has become so much the
fashion to publish letters,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘that I put as little
into mine as I can.’ Nevertheless, when Boswell subsequently asked
him if it would be proper to publish any of his letters after death,
Johnson contented himself by remarking: ‘Nay, sir, when I am dead you
may do as you will with mine.’
There has been no little affectation in some notable persons, and a
remarkable candour in others, with respect to the publication of these
documents. Pope addressed his letters to his friends, but he carefully
and elaborately wrote and re-wrote them for posterity, and he was not
sorry to see some of them get into print (he rather helping them to
that end than obstructing them), that he might have a foretaste of the
enjoyment which was more especially intended for after ages. Every
line in Walpole’s letters reads as if it were as much intended for
_us_ of any year to come as for the happy friend to whom the letter
was directed; but this diminishes neither Walpole’s credit nor our
appreciation. Pepys never intended his ‘Diary’ to be perused by any
mortal eye but his own. The Rev. Mr. Smith, however, deciphered the
shorthand, and the best social history of Pepys’ time fell into the
hands of a delighted and grateful public. Evelyn wrote _his_ ‘Diary’
for his own satisfaction, indifferent, as Dr. Johnson about his
letters, whether it were published or not after his death. Evelyn’s
descendants were ignorant of its value, and it is to a stranger we
owe those sketches of contemporary men and things which now enrich
our literature. Pepys, Evelyn, Walpole--diaries and letters; of how
many exquisite stories we should have known nothing but for those
three individuals! It matters little whether they intended we should
enjoy that knowledge or not; sufficient for us that we _do_. And let
us note in passing another letter-writer--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Her letters are not quite so popular, so much read, or so well known,
perhaps, as they used to be; they may have had their day, but the
writer was well assured they would at least have _that_. ‘Keep my
letters,’ she once wrote to a friend; ‘they will be as good as Madame
de Sévigné’s forty years hence.’
They certainly contain many things worth the knowing. The writer’s
descriptions of foreign scenes and incidents are full of life and
spirit, generally truthful, and always effective without marring the
truth. There is one passage in one of her ladyship’s letters which
illustrates the writer’s power in a particularly delicate matter, which
is well deserving notice. Mr. Montagu’s sister died. She had been Lady
Mary Pierrepont’s dearest friend. Young Montagu had to communicate
the news of his sister’s death to the young Lady Mary. In her reply
the latter said: ‘I know it is not acting in form, but I do not look
upon you as I do upon the rest of the world. You are brother to a woman
whom I tenderly loved.’ The young fellow excused the informality; he
was proud of being looked upon by the young beauty in a different way
from the rest of the world. As that young beauty reminded him that he
was brother to the woman she so tenderly loved, he was not dull, and
had no difficulty in persuading her to love the brother even better
than she had done the sister. The marriage, however, was not made in
heaven. The lady herself had some suspicion about the consequences. ‘I
tremble,’ she wrote to her intended husband, ‘for what we are doing.
Shall we never repent?... I shall come to you only with a nightgown and
petticoat, and that is all you will get by me.’ She adds significantly:
‘I had rather die than return to a dependency upon relations I have
disobliged.’ In her first letter to her (absent) husband after marriage
she alludes to the children of the family in which she was residing,
and says: ‘It furnishes my imagination with agreeable pictures of our
future life, and I flatter myself with the hopes of one day enjoying
with you the same satisfaction ... when the noise of a nursery may have
more charms for us than the music of the opera.’
While on the subject of the publication of posthumous letters, we may
add that other men besides Johnson have written their own so as to
gratify posterity as little as possible. Some are as cautious with
respect to contemporaries. One of the most venerable of our peers was
once told that several of his letters were catalogued for sale in a
London auction room. ‘It is a matter of indifference to me,’ said the
noble lord; ‘from the day I became a public man I never wrote a line
worth the reading by anyone except the person to whom my letter was
addressed.’
The assertion that a lady puts the essence, nay, the very purpose and
import of her letter, in the postscript, has had many an ingenious but
invented illustration. One of the best is that of a young lady in India
to her friends at home, viz.:--‘P.S. You will see by my signature that
I am married.’ Cobbett hated writing across already written lines,
and declared that it was of French origin. The earliest letter by a
lady, in this country, of which a copy exists, is one from Matilda,
Queen of Henry I., to Archbishop Anselm. In this she styles him her
‘worthily reverenced lord,’ and herself ‘the lowest of the handmaidens
of his holiness;’ phrases which show the mind and hand of some reverend
secretary. Anne Boleyn’s last cry of love and anguish to her lord is
worth a ream of the letters of earlier date written at second hand. It
is genuineness that gives all the interest to the Paston Letters (once
so disputed); Agnes Paston’s to her son may be said to be admirable for
detail and simplicity. ‘God’s blessing and mine,’ is a fitting double
benediction from a mother to her son. How picturesquely descriptive is
the passage, ‘On Tuesday last Sir John Heveningham went to his church
and heard three masses, and came home again, never merrier, and said
to his wife that he would go say a little devotion in his garden and
then he would dine; and forthwith he felt a fainting in his legs and
slid down. This was at nine of the clock and he was dead ere noon.’
Such were life and death in the middle of the fifteenth century in the
county of Norfolk. We may notice, after the above illustration of a
letter from a mother to her son, one from a wife to her husband, but
of the seventeenth century. In a letter from Susan Montague to her
husband Edward, who has announced his being about to leave Madrid for
England, the sprightly Susan replied to her ‘sweetheart’ that she fears
she may weary his eyes with her ‘tedious scribblement,’ and after many
allusions to herself and two ladies, with matters of confidence, Susan
Montague concludes by saying: ‘So being very late, as a matter of ten
o’clock, I bid you good night, going into the little bed, which I find
less than ever it was, and never have no mind to go into it because I
cannot find my sweeting there. But when I am there I sleep as little
as may be, for I am still riding post to Madrid, which I hope doth
presage that you will shortly post from there and come to the little
chamber again, which I heartily pray for. So, dear heart, farewell.
Your truly loving wife--SU. MONTAGUE.’ The orthography of ladies became
rather worse than better in the times after Susan Montague wrote. In
the last century ladies spelt ‘physician’ with a capital F, and in the
old game of ‘loving’ would not be conscious of wrong in saying, ‘I
love my love with a G, because he’s a Gustus!’ There are some curious
samples of ill spelling in the Delany correspondence. Cacography seemed
to be intermittent like the ague. The wrong thing came with the east
wind or epidemics. Sometimes an odd word or two would baffle a lady.
At the beginning of the present century the exquisite Alison Cockburn
referred in one of her letters to some ‘unpareleled boon.’ The word
caught her eye, and she gaily added as a postscript, ‘Cannot spell
unparaleled.’
The letters of fine gentlemen are written in a fine gentlemanly way.
If the fine gentleman be a wit and a poet it does not always improve
the style of the letter. Much nonsense has been written upon Waller
and his Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney). The facts of their supposed
love passages have grown up out of the imaginations of sentimental
writers. When Lady Dorothy married Lord Spencer, Waller wrote to her
sister, Lady Lucy, a letter which would now be considered much more
impudent than witty. But the poet’s hand is in it as well as the
impudent wit’s. After sympathising with Lady Lucy on the loss of her
sister ‘bedfellow,’ and expressing a hope that the latter would soon
‘taste of the first curse imposed on woman,’ and often; in due course
of time, the poet wishes, ‘May she then arrive at that great curse so
much declined by fair ladies, old age. May she live to be very old and
yet seem young, be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform
her of the truth. And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord
not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we
are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, that being
there divorced we may all have an equal interest in her again.’
Letters _to_ children are as difficult to write as books _for_
children. Crabb Robinson stands at the head of all inditers of little
epistles to little folk. He is not in the vein of Jeffrey to his
granddaughter, as in ‘I send you my blessing and wish I was kissing
your sweet rosy lips or your fat finger tips.’ Robinson comes nearer
to Hood, only that he could not stoop to use old jokes as well as make
new. The two are together in the following paragraph in Hood’s letter
to May, one of Dr. Elliot’s daughters: ‘Tell Dunnie that Tom has set
his trap in the balcony, and has caught a cold; and tell Jeanie that
Fanny has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up yet....
The other night, when I came from Stratford, the cold shrivelled me up
so that when I got home I thought I was my own child.’ The best thing
Crabb Robinson did in this way was by surprising a little girl, who
said she did not know how to write a letter to her little brother, by
proving to her that she was a perfect letter-writer. She had asked
Robinson to suggest all the subjects. He proposed purposely something
untrue, then something silly, but both were rejected by the child on
the ground of their untruthfulness and silliness. This process went on
till the child adopted such subjects as were adapted to her purpose,
and she found she was a good letter-writer without knowing it.
We conclude with an unpublished letter, from an American lady we
believe, who some quarter of a century ago aspired to be the instructor
of children. The quaintness and simplicity, for it is all sober
earnestness, are worthy of being preserved: ‘DEAR SIR,--Having heard
that you are in want of a governess for your children, I write to offer
myself as a candidate for that post. My acquirements are English in
all its branches, French, German, music, which I play well, singing,
painting, drawing, and dancing. My age is just 28. I am a lady by
birth, high-spirited, and I am sorry to say slightly quick-tempered,
but still very fond of children, likewise of gentlemen’s society; I am
rather delicate, and when not as well as usual require a few tempting
viands. I hope, if you decide in having me for your children as their
governess, that you will allow me the _entrée_ of your drawing-room at
all times, and that you will also allow me to join in all your domestic
amusements. I wish to inform you that I have been in the habit of
receiving 60_l._ (sixty pounds) per annum, or fifty pounds (50_l._)
with laundress, and all travelling expenses paid. You may be glad to
hear that I have an elegant figure, small hands and feet, and am, if my
friends and admirers are to be believed, engaging.’
With this sample we may leave our readers to pass on to fresh woods and
pastures new.
_THE TWENTY-THOUSAND-POUND WIDOW._
In the reign of Charles I. the Old Jewry, which runs from Cheapside to
Cateaton Street, was a fashionable locality. Merchant princes lived
and died there. The old church, St. Olave Jewry, or St. Olave Upwell,
was a fashionable church. Merchant princesses worshipped there, and
their daughters were worshipped by the undevout apprentices. The Jewry
had its fashionable old hostelry in the Windmill. It lives in Ben
Jonson’s drama. It was there that Captain Bobadil told of his heroism
at the siege of Strigonium, and there he pished at the idea of Master
Stephen’s Provant rapier passing for a Toledo blade. One May morning,
A.D. 1628, George Newman, the rich widow Bennett’s first serving-man,
was taking his early draught at the Windmill. His master, the rich
mercer, a Bennett of the stock from which the Tankerville earls have
sprung, was then lying, a month old in his tenantcy, in a grave in
St. Olave’s, next to another mercer, Robert Large, the master of one
who came to be more famous, namely, Caxton, the father of English
printing. Bennett’s widow was then sitting behind her rich curtains
in Jewry Street meditating on a world of speculative subjects. ‘She’s
a twenty-thousand-pound widow,’ said Newman, as he wiped his lips with
the sleeve of his coat. ‘She’ll be a bride, and a lady to boot, before
long. She has as many suitors as she has thousands.’ ‘And,’ said a
bystander, ‘will maybe marry the biggest knave or the most perfect
fool of the lot.’ ‘Not so,’ rejoined the serving-man. ‘Do you see Mr.
Recorder passing by from his court? He is a friend of the family, and
will see that neither rogue nor ass carries off the wealthy widow.’
‘Ay!’ cried the host of the Windmill, ‘Mistress Bennett is in safe
hands, with Sir Heneage Finch for her guardian and her little son’s
guardian.’ And so said all who stood within hearing.