addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy--the name of
Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray's: gifted Hopkins is
the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Guardian Angel." The
author's object has been to discuss a few literary topics with more
freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of
essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently the
author's critic than his collaborator.




INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY


_To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas_.

Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting
sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor "Letters
to Dead Authors." You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write
some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of the
question,--for me.

A thoughtful critic in the _Spectator_ has already remarked that the
great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they
could read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they
can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was
Matt's little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different
people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's
comments on them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address." Yet
there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.