The correspondence of a man about whom such—­words may be said without exaggeration has more than a merely literary interest.  This book is one of which the literary critic is not the final judge.  Tocqueville’s letters, like every genuine series of letters written without thought of publication, have the charm and more than the simplicity of autobiography.  Their merit lies not so much in grace of style, picturesqueness of description, or familiar freedom of composition, as in their exhibition of power of thought combined with delicacy and refinement of feeling, and in the frequent expression of ardent patriotism and strong personal sympathies with public or with private interests.  They are the letters of a man who took a grave view of life, regarding it “as an affair with which we are charged, which must be carried through and ended with honor to ourselves.”  They are the letters also of a man of strong and faithful affections; and the long series of them addressed during twenty-five years to the Count Louis de Kergorlay has, in addition to its interest from its variety of topics, a special moral value as the record of a close and confidential friendship maintained in spite of the widest divergence of political opinion during a period of unusual political excitement.  Few men have the temper or the sentiment requisite for the support of intimate relations under such conditions.  But his friendships occupied a very large place in Tocqueville’s life.  In them he found happiness and repose.  To one of his friends he writes in 1844, “The remembrance of you is the more precious to me because it calms in me all those troubles of the soul that politics engender.”  And thus in the most trying passages of his life, and especially in the discouragement of his later years, the thought of his friends seems to have been constantly with him, and his correspondence with them became almost a necessity for his spirit.  His letters, or rather that portion of them which M. de Beaumont has published, and which must some day be succeeded by a fuller collection, have thus a double character:  they contain the judgments of a wide and profound thinker on the subjects which interested him, while they show him in the most amiable and attractive light as a generous and constant friend.  They are not to be compared in wit or elaborate finish with the brilliant letters of Courier; they have not the striking originality and terse vigor of those of De Maistre, but they have the grace of simple and pure feeling, and the worth of clear, manly, high-toned thought.  No one capable of appreciating them can read them without learning to feel toward their author not merely respect, but also a strong personal regard.  The two following extracts have a special appropriateness to the present condition of our own country, while at the same time they display the qualities most characteristic of Tocqueville’s intellect.  They are both from letters addressed to one of the most distinguished correspondents of his later years, Madame de Swetchine.