The fact may thus be made to cut two ways.

From our point of view, it may be cited in direct denial of the conclusion that people wrote well in past days simply because the conveyance of their letters was costly.  We believe that the mass wrote just as badly and loosely then as the mass do now, in fact that they were rather loose on rules of spelling; and that the specimens preserved and presented to us in type are exceptional, and escaped destruction with the mass precisely because they were exceptional.

Other circumstances may be taken to account for the loose epistolary style or rather no-style now so common; and this refers us to the general question of education—­more especially the education of women.  In those days the few were educated; and to be educated was regarded as the distinctive mark of a leisured and cultivated class:  now, education is general, but, like many other things, it has suffered in the process of diffusion, whether or not it may in the long run suffer by the diffusion itself.

The truth is, time alone can tell whether among the select nowadays the epistolary art is not simply as perfect as it was in days past; at all events we believe so, and proceed to set down a few reflections on letter-writing.

To write a really good letter, two things in especial are demanded.  The first is, that you write only of that which is either familiar to you or in which you have some interest; and in the next, that you can write with ease, and on a footing of freedom as regards your correspondent.  “The pen,” says Cervantes, “is the tongue of the mind,” and in no form of composition is this more strictly true than of letters.  In a certain degree a letter should share the characteristics of good conversation:  the writer must realise the presence and the mood of the person for whom the letter is destined.  Just as good-breeding suggests that you must have the tastes and sentiments of your interlocutor before you for ends of enjoyable conversation, and that, within the limits of propriety and self-respect, you should at once humour them and use them; so in good letter-writing you must write for your correspondent’s pleasure as well as please, by merely communicating, yourself.

Here comes in the delightful element of vicarious sympathy, or dramatic transference, which, brought into play successfully, with some degree of wit and sprightliness of expression, may raise letter-writing to the level of a fine art.

And this allowed, it is clear that letters may just be as good now as at any former period, and accidental circumstances have really little to do with it.  Humboldt has well said that “A letter is a conversation between the present and the absent.  Its fate is that it cannot last, but must pass away like the sound of the voice.”

And just as in conversation all attempt at eloquence and personal celebration in this kind is rigidly proscribed, so in letter-writing are all kinds of fine-writing and rhetoric.  “Brilliant speakers and writers,” it has been well said, “should remember that coach wheels are better than Catherine wheels to travel on.”  One’s first business, in letter-writing is to say what one has to say, and the second to say it well and with taste and ease.