people generally use without troubling themselves to look into their
title to currency. It is often said, for instance, with an air of
deploring a phase of general mental degeneracy, that "letter-writing is
a lost art." And so it is,---not because men nowadays, if they were put
to it, could not, on the average, write as good letters as ever (the
average although we certainly have no Lambs, and perhaps no Walpoles or
Southeys to raise it, would probably be higher), but because the
conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely
passed away. With our modern facility of communication, the letter has
lost the pristine dignity of its function. The earth has dwindled
strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation
used to Mr. Edison's devices, Puck's girdle presents no difficulties to
the imagination. In Charles Lamb's time the expression "from Land's End
to John O'Groat's" meant something; to-day it means a few comfortable
hours by rail, a few minutes by telegraph. Wordsworth in the North of
England was to Lamb, so far as the chance of personal contact was
concerned, nearly as remote as Manning in China. Under such conditions a
letter was of course a weighty matter; it was a thoughtful summary of
opinion, a rarely recurring budget of general intelligence, expensive to
send, and paid for by the recipient; and men put their minds and
energies into composing it. "One wrote at that time," says W.C. Hazlitt,
"a letter to an acquaintance in one of the home counties which one would
only write nowadays to a settler in the Colonies or a relative
in India."

But to whatever conditions or circumstances we may owe the existence of
Charles Lamb's letters, their quality is of course the fruit of the
genius and temperament of the writer. Unpremeditated as the strain of
the skylark, they have almost to excess (were that possible) the prime
epistolary merit of spontaneity. From the brain of the writer to the