A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate them in their completeness.  The late Mrs. Paget Toynbee, while preparing her edition of Horace Walpole’s letters, came upon the trace of the original manuscripts, which had long lain hidden in obscurity in a country house in Staffordshire.  The publication of these manuscripts in full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs. Toynbee’s well-known accuracy, industry, and tact are everywhere conspicuous, is an event of no small importance to lovers of French literature.  A great mass of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance.  The original edition produced by Miss Berry in 1810, from which all the subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy, turns out to have contained nothing more than a comparatively small fraction of the whole correspondence; of the 838 letters published by Mrs. Toynbee, 485 are entirely new, and of the rest only 52 were printed by Miss Berry in their entirety.  Miss Berry’s edition was, in fact, simply a selection, and as a selection it deserves nothing but praise.  It skims the cream of the correspondence; and it faithfully preserves the main outline of the story which the letters reveal.  No doubt that was enough for the readers of that generation; indeed, even for the more exacting reader of to-day, there is something a little overwhelming in the closely packed 2000 pages of Mrs. Toynbee’s volumes.  Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded.  In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—­the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities:  it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils.  Probably Miss Berry’s edition will still be preferred by the ordinary reader who wishes to become acquainted with a celebrated figure in French literature; but Mrs. Toynbee’s will always be indispensable for the historical student, and invaluable for anyone with the leisure, the patience, and the taste for a detailed and elaborate examination of a singular adventure of the heart.

The Marquise du Deffand was perhaps the most typical representative of that phase of civilisation which came into existence in Western Europe during the early years of the eighteenth century, and reached its most concentrated and characteristic form about the year 1750 in the drawing-rooms of Paris.  She was supremely a woman of her age; but it is important to notice that her age was the first, and not the second, half of the eighteenth century:  it was the age of the Regent Orleans, Fontenelle, and the young Voltaire; not that of Rousseau, the ‘Encyclopaedia,’ and the Patriarch of Ferney.  It is true that her letters to Walpole, to which her fame is mainly due, were written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every