The name Chicksands caught my eye in a daily paper
on Tuesday (in connection with a sad drowning accident). It is a very small villag-e. in Bedfordshire, and probably thousands of people, like myself, have never heard of it before except in one connection. Chicksands was the home of Dorothy Osborne (who married Sir William Temple, Swift's patron, and is buried in Westminster Abbey) writer of some of the most charming love-letters in the English language. Lord David Cecil gives her a place beside Gray in his Two Quiet Lives and so calls deserved attention to a collection of letters that were only published for the first time (apart from extracts) in 1888, more than two hundred years after they were written. It is hard to think of a heroine in fiction who could stand beside Dorothy Osborne as her letters reveal her.
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