CERTAIN WITTIE AND FAMILIAR LETTERS

An English Letter Book. Compiled and edited by Francis Bickley. (Guy Chapman. 10s. 6d. net.) 'WHAT is one to say about a bundle of letters ranging over five centuries, except that one expects letters to be of a certain flavour, and even that flavour is difficult to limit ? The best in the book I take to be that from Viscount Irwin to his wife in 1695, beginning.

My prety. Dear penny, I wonder whate deversion you can find at Hereby among my old ants who are as mannolcolly as the Devil. . . ."

It fits in with Swift's demand for " good sense, civility and friendship, without any stiffness or restraint," it suits with James Howell's definition " as if he were discoursing with the Party to whom he writes in succinct and short terms," and satisfies my own chief requirement that a letter shall be written in a kind of sympathetic collaboration between sender and receiver. But taste is not enough. One must arrange in order, and the only thing to do is to divide them into people or dates or kinds. Here the people are mainly new, and the familiar names are far from giving us the best, and that

arises from the way in which this book has been compiled. The Historical Manuscripts Commission catalogues the ancient lumber rooms of the kingdom, noting, item 1021 letters from Christopher Hatton, containing general and very inter- esting news; item one bundle of letters from Dryden and Congreve, and gives us a snippet :- " Dryden tells a poet to avoid shan't and can't, not to end a sentence with a preposition, and not to say that when -who is proper."

Mr. Bickley has gone through their hundred and more volumes

and picked out for our delight the freshest and most interesting of selections. Ile has given us an epistolary survey of English history and manners, and here, if one is forced back to dates, comes much profit.

The ages change with kaleidoscopic richness, the sixteenth century is more under the domination of business and the

complete letter-writer than we imagine, though it did not, as our century has done, evolve a Philosophy of Brevity and Commercial Correspondence. We have poignant letters, from Cardinal Wolsey, earnest letters, and a feeling that the lan- guage is not firm enough for facetiousness. The seventeenth

century is the richest of all, despite Professor Saintsbury's worthy pleading for the eighteenth. It is the playground

between the Renaissance and rational enlightenment, packed with fantasy and familiarity. There is a quaint mediaeval classification of letters into deliterative, judicial, and familiar, with minor kinds as swasorie, amatorie, remunetratorie, or jocatorie (" a sweete kind of deliverance of some pretty con- ceit "). The seventeenth century seems to he familiar, jocatorie and narratorie, though not without seriousness. Thomas Hobbes in 1634, vainly seeking Galileo's Dialogues, says :- " I heare say it is called in, in Italy, as a booke that will do snore hurt to their religion then all the booker have done of Luther and Calvin, such opposition they thinke is between their religion, and naturall rease-o.'

But for the rest it is a time of masquerades and racing and fighting. Lady Chaworth writes in 167t

" For niewse, the King sup't two nights egos with Mr. Griffin,

Lord Mountagu, Mr. Bernard Howard and all the jockeys being invited to meet -his Majestie ;- and - there -they have made four matches to be run at Newmarket."

A- brand new name, the sparkling Viscount Conway and Kilulta, both soldier and sailor, and according to Clarendon, " a voluptuous man in eating and drinking, and of great licence in all other excesses," gives some of our liveliest

glimpses. Aboard ship, he says in 1636 :-

"There is an apothecary a very pretty fellow and your neighbour, iu the first fowle weather he offered the master and his mates, glisters round gratis to set him a shoat's any where."

King Charles II. lives up to his reputation. In 1678 Lady Mohun and the landlady of a Restoration night-club quarrelled with candlesticks ; the case came before the House of Lords and was dismissed :-

" And it entertained the King mightily who was att the House, and desired that he might be judge whether the candlesticks had hurt my Lady Mohun's knee."

It is worth noting that fully a third of these letters are from women, and they contain the liveliest touches, whether of scandal or of characterization. Perhaps it is the emancipation of this mood that has so enriched the modern novel. Certainly their spelling is picturesque, and our modem phonologists bless them, for they often wrote the noises they made in speech. Clothes are not forgotten and Bridget Noel in 1685 is a gem :—

" I am told that they ways peteots of the same as they make the linens of. Coelerd night gowns is mutch worn, for few waers black. I am wondered at for buying a black petcot, for they say black mantos is worn, but colerd petcots with the mantos. My Lady Exeter was in a black cloth gown, but it was coot in strips, and set uppon black latstreng."

Foreign travel in that Frenchified age comes in for its share of description, and there is some modernity in Henry Savile's complaint to the Earl of Rochester in 1679 :—

" I confesse the small beer is very badd, and a man cannot gett a pipe of good tobacco for love nor money."

Lady Anne Howe is hard on the " Russhie Embasadore " :-

"Sure he cannot live long, for he makes noething of a pint of brandie at a draught with a spoonful of white pepper in it." •

Patriotism is not absent amid the frivolity, and we find the great Trimmer, the Marquess of Halifax, in 1690, forestalling Churchill and Cowper in saying :— -

" England, which with all its faults is your own country still."

The eighteenth century is full of blue-stockings, and the like of that great " lounge-lizard " Horace Walpole. Elizabeth Montagu, " The Queen of the Blues," comes in a great deal ; she suggests that a rival Blue, Mrs. Carter, " must submit to an operation to take the Greek out of her head." History rushes up when the Duchess of Marlborough speaks of

" the black ingratitude of Mrs. Masham, a woman that I took out of a garret and saved from starving and all her family."

And the women in general are severely put in their place by Sir John Perceval, who has very firm views. At a perfor- mance of Othello in 1709 he notices " a flat insensibility in every lady, as if tenderness were no longer a virtue in your sex, whereas I own freely, had not Desdemona been very ugly, I had certainly pulled out my handkerchief."

And concludes with a very human criticism of the play :--

" I declare that they who cannot be moved by Othello's story so artfully worked up by Shakespeare, and 'justly played by Betterton, are capable' of marrying again before their husbands are cold, of trampling on a lover when dying at their feet, and are fit to converse with tigers only."

The presence of some " battle-pieces " raises some reflections on the alleged decay of the art of letter-writing. I cannot see it. I get letters that can be reread with pleasure long after the event, and even my tailor with his swasorie epistles is far

removed from what the Americans call " letters that make good." The recent War in dictating its circumstances of censorship made it imperative to write on everything but the War, and the letters of those who fell show us that they spoke grandly of philosophy and the arts, of life and literature :—

" When the swift iron burning bee

• Drained the wild honey of their youth."

The author of these lines, that neglected fine poet, Isaac Rosenberg, in his last letters, was concerned still with poetry, and the incantation of word-music. He wrote to Gordon Bottomley that poetry should be " understandable and still ungraspable." Put this alongside Hannah More's unconscious epitome of the eighteenth century :—

" As she is bold enough to think that lyric poetry is extremely apt to bo unintelligible (though she honours the sound of it) she confesses with all humility, that she does not experience so much delight in the perusal of it, as from more common areas compositions."

The letters of our War, when published, will not be about the War, but about the awakening into life of many who lived into unhappiness, and many who were sharply saved from disillu- sionment. Nevertheless, a real war letter snakes good reading, and the Earl of Pembroke in 1760 gives us such a real letter, that would fill six columns of the Spectator, describing how, with Candide as his constant pocket companion, he felt the truth of Othello's " 'Tis the soldiers' life, to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife," and says, more definitely :- "That same retreating is a very comical, ugly operation, being kicked, then turning about again to snarl, shew your teeth, and walk off again."

Lord Nelson in 1803 is more concise :-

" I never saw a Frenchman yet fighting for fighting's sake."

There is no limit to the quotations one might make. After eating and drinking, love-making, being born, and writing and dying, fighting and painting and singing and being catty, there is not much to talk about except perhaps praying and politics—and the last word must be with Jemima Countess Cornwallis :-

"Don't laugh at my being political. I assure you I do not think a female ought to talk politics, but when it comes to hus- band, friends, &c., one must feel, and it will out."

We are introduced to a body of fresh writers who must be reckoned with when the anthology of wholly interesting letters comes to be compiled. Lady Chaworth, Henry Savile Viscount Conway, Viscount Irwin, must be considered, and we must not forget Dr. Arbuthnot, Garrick and John Wesley. Mr. Bickley promises another volume, if we ask for it. We certainly do ask, and ask one thing more, that he take the opportunity of recording his observations on the development of English letter-writing. and give us the benefit of his perusal of much that he has felt bound to reject. He is to be congratu- lated on having added to our store of human and readable