The most patient correspondent known to fame was Sir Walter Scott, though Lord Byron surprises us at times by the fine quality of his good nature.  His letters are often petulant,—­especially when Murray has sent him tragedies instead of tooth-powder; but he is perhaps the only man on record who received with perfect equanimity the verses of an aspiring young poet, wrote him the cheerfullest of letters, and actually invited him to breakfast.  The letter is still extant; but the verses were so little the precursor of fame that the youth’s subsequent history is to this day unknown.  It was with truth that Byron said of himself:  “I am really a civil and polite person, and do hate pain when it can be avoided.”

Scott was also civil and polite, and his heart beat kindly for every species of bore.  As a consequence, the world bestowed its tediousness upon him, to the detriment of his happiness and health.  Ingenious jokers translated his verses into Latin, and then wrote to accuse him of plagiarizing from Vida.  Proprietors of patent medicines offered him fabulous sums to link his fame with theirs.  Modest ladies proposed that he should publish their effusions as his own, and share the profits.  Poets demanded that he should find publishers for their epics, and dramatists that he should find managers for their plays.  Critics pointed out to him his anachronisms, and well-intentioned readers set him right on points of morality and law.  When he was old, and ill, and ruined, there was yet no respite from the curse of correspondents.  A year before his death he wrote dejectedly in his journal:—­“A fleece of letters which must be answered, I suppose; all from persons—­my zealous admirers, of course—­who expect me to make up whatever losses have been their lot, raise them to a desirable rank, and stand their protector and patron.  I must, they take it for granted, be astonished at having an address from a stranger.  On the contrary, I should be astonished if one of these extravagant epistles came from anybody who had the least title to enter into correspondence.”

And there are people who believe, or who pretend to believe, that fallen human nature can be purged and amended by half-rate telegrams, and a telephone ringing in the hall.  Rather let us abandon illusions, and echo Carlyle’s weary cry, when he heard the postman knocking at his door:  “Just Heavens!  Does literature lead to this!”

The Benefactor

   “He is a good man who can receive a gift well.”—­EMERSON.

There is a sacredness of humility in such an admission which wins pardon for all the unlovely things which Emerson has crowded into a few pages upon “Gifts.”  Recognizing that his own goodness stopped short of this exalted point, he pauses for a moment in his able and bitter self-defence to pay tribute to a generosity he is too honest to claim.  After all, who but Charles Lamb ever did receive gifts well?  Scott tried, to be sure.  No man ever sinned less than he against the law of kindness.  But Lamb did not need to try.  He had it in his heart of gold to feel pleasure in the presents which his friends took pleasure in giving him.  The character and quality of the gifts were not determining factors.  We cannot analyze this disposition.  We can only admire it from afar.