a mine of gossip about numberless persons and events still familiar to
many a living memory, and, on the other, as a detailed and brilliant
record of a state of society which had already ceased to be actual and
become historical. The letters were hardly more than thirty years old;
but the world which they depicted in all its intensity and all its
singularity--the world of the old régime--had vanished for ever into
limbo. Between it and the eager readers of the First Empire a gulf was
fixed--a narrow gulf, but a deep one, still hot and sulphurous with the
volcanic fires of the Revolution. Since then a century has passed; the
gulf has widened; and the vision which these curious letters show us
to-day seems hardly less remote--from some points of view, indeed, even
more--than that which is revealed to us in the Memoirs of Cellini or the
correspondence of Cicero. Yet the vision is not simply one of a strange
and dead antiquity: there is a personal and human element in the letters
which gives them a more poignant interest, and brings them close to
ourselves. The soul of man is not subject to the rumour of periods; and
these pages, impregnated though they be with the abolished life of the
eighteenth century, can never be out of date.

A fortunate chance enables us now, for the first time, to appreciate
them in their completeness. The late Mrs. Paget Toynbee, while preparing
her edition of Horace Walpole's letters, came upon the trace of the
original manuscripts, which had long lain hidden in obscurity in a
country house in Staffordshire. The publication of these manuscripts in
full, accompanied by notes and indexes in which Mrs. Toynbee's
well-known accuracy, industry, and tact are everywhere conspicuous, is
an event of no small importance to lovers of French literature. A great
mass of new and deeply interesting material makes its appearance. The
original edition produced by Miss Berry in 1810, from which all the
subsequent editions were reprinted with varying degrees of inaccuracy,