As we became a literary nation, familiar letters served as a vehicle for the fresh feelings of our first authors.  Howell, whose Epistolae bears his name, takes a wider circumference in “Familiar Letters, domestic and foreign, historical, political, and philosophical, upon emergent occasions.”  The “emergent occasions” the lively writer found in his long confinement in the Fleet—­that English Parnassus!  Howell is a wit, who, in writing his own history, has written that of his times; he is one of the few whose genius, striking in the heat of the moment only current coin, produces finished medals for the cabinet.  His letters are still published.  The taste which had now arisen for collecting letters, induced Sir Tobie Mathews, in 1660, to form a volume, of which many, if not all, are genuine productions of their different writers.

The dissipated elegance of Charles II. inspired freedom in letter-writing.  The royal emigrant had caught the tone of Voiture.  We have some few letters of the wits of this court, but that school of writers, having sinned in gross materialism, the reaction produced another of a more spiritual nature, in a romantic strain of the most refined sentiment.  Volumes succeeded volumes from pastoral and heroic minds.  Katherine Philips, in the masquerade-dress of “The Matchless Orinda,” addressed Sir Charles Cottrel, her grave “Poliarchus;” while Mrs. Behn, in her loose dress, assuming the nymph-like form of “Astraea,” pursued a gentleman, concealed in a domino, under the name of “Lycidas.”

Before our letters reached to nature and truth, they were strained by one more effort after novelty; a new species appeared, “From the Dead to the Living,” by Mrs. Rowe:  they obtained celebrity.  She was the first who, to gratify the public taste, adventured beyond the Styx; the caprice of public favour has returned them to the place whence they came.

The letters of Pope were unquestionably written for the public eye.  Partly accident, and partly persevering ingenuity, extracted from the family chests the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who long remained the model of letter-writing.  The letters of Hughes and Shenstone, of Gray, Cowper, Walpole, and others, self-painters, whose indelible colours have given an imperishable charm to these fragments of the human mind, may close our subject; printed familiar letters now enter into the history of our literature.

AN INQUIRY

INTO THE

LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF
JAMES THE FIRST;

INCLUDING A SKETCH OF HIS AGE.

“The whole reign of James I. has been represented by a late celebrated pen (Burnet) to have been a continued course of mean practices; and others, who have professedly given an account of it, have filled their works with libel and invective, instead of history.  Both King James and his ministers have met with a treatment from posterity highly unworthy of them, and those who have so liberally bestowed their censures were entirely ignorant of the true springs and causes of the actions they have undertaken to represent.”—­SAWYER’S Preface to “Winwood’s Memorials.”