ENGLISH LETTER WRITERS. Selected by R. Brimley Johnson. (Gerald Howe.
7s. 6d.)—In this anthology Mr. , Johnson has attempted, with difficulty; to show the function . of letter writing as a mirror of contemporary life and thought from Sir Thomas More to R. L. Stevenson. The result is not . too successful. The delightful domestic exchanges of the Pastons, after all, differ little from the domestic letters of to-day. Only in the eighteenth century, when the letter became the fashionable vehicle of highly moral and mannered sentiments, do we find a self-conscious reflection of the age.
• Mr. Johnson admits failure in his attempt to relegate the letters of Victorian authors to a formal plan. The inimitable :letters of Mrs. Carlyle, with their spirited and tragic household details (" Mrs. Russell was in despair over her hens ; thirty - of them yielded but three eggs a day "), the love letters of the Brownings, the squibii-of Edward FitzGeiald, have purely an individual interest.
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