Generally speaking, the unknown correspondent does not write to praise.  His guiding principle is the diffusion of useless knowledge, and he demands or imparts it according to the exigencies of the hour.  It is strange that a burning thirst for information should be combined with such reluctance to acquire it through ordinary channels.  A man who wishes to write a paper on the botanical value of Shakespeare’s plays does not dream of consulting a concordance and a botany, and then going to work.  The bald simplicity of such a process offends his sense of magnitude.  He writes to a distinguished scholar, asking a number of burdensome questions, and is apparently under the impression that the resources of the scholar’s mind, the fruits of boundless industry, should be cheerfully placed at his disposal.  A woman who meditates a “literary essay” upon domestic pets is not content to track her quarry through the long library shelves.  She writes to some painstaking worker, enquiring what English poets have “sung the praises of the cat,” and if Cowper was the only author who ever domesticated hares?  One of Huxley’s most amusing letters is written in reply to a gentleman who wished to compile an article on “Home Pets of Celebrities,” and who unhesitatingly applied for particulars concerning the Hodeslea cat.

These are, of course, labour-saving devices, but economy of effort is not always the ambition of the correspondent.  It would seem easier, on the whole, to open a dictionary of quotations than to compose an elaborately polite letter, requesting to know who said—­

   “Fate cannot harm me; I have dined to-day.”

It is certainly easier, and far more agreeable, to read Charles Lamb’s essays than to ask a stranger in which one of them he discovered the author’s heterodox views on encyclopaedias.  It involves no great fatigue to look up a poem of Herrick’s, or a letter of Shelley’s, or a novel of Peacock’s (these things are accessible and repay enquiry), and it would be a rational and self-respecting thing to do, instead of endeavouring to extort information (like an intellectual footpad) from writers who are in no way called upon to furnish it.

One thing is sure.  As long as there are people in this world whose guiding principle is the use of other people’s brains, there can be no decline and fall of letter-writing.  The correspondence which plagued our great-grandfathers a hundred years ago, plagues their descendants to-day.  Readers of Lockhart’s “Scott” will remember how an Edinburgh minister named Brunton, who wished to compile a hymnal, wrote to the poet Crabbe for a list of hymns; and how Crabbe (who, albeit a clergyman, knew probably as little about hymns as any man in England) wrote in turn to Scott, to please help him to help Brunton; and how Scott replied in desperation that he envied the hermit of Prague who never saw pen nor ink.  How many of us have in our day thought longingly of that blessed anchorite!  Surely Mr.