Since old Leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too
fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence.
Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his
mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best
work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited
abandonment which we see in "Pickwick," and the full geniality of his
mind came out delightfully. The letter in which he describes a certain
infant schoolboy who lost himself at the Great Exhibition is one of
the funniest things in literature, but it is equalled in positive
value by some of the more serious letters which the great man sent off
in the intervals of his heavy labour. Dickens could do nothing by
halves, and thus, at times when he could have earned forty pounds a
day by sheer literary work, he would spend hours in answering people
whom he had never seen, and, what is more remarkable, these
"task"-letters were marked by all the brilliant strength and
spontaneity of his finest chapters. He was the last of the true
correspondents, and we shall not soon look upon his like again. With
all the contrivances for increasing our speed of communication, and
for enabling us to cram more varied action into a single life, we have
less and less time to spare for salutary human intercourse. The
post-card symbolises the tendency of the modern mind. We have come to
find out so many things which ought to be done that we make up our
minds to do nothing whatever thoroughly; and the day may come when the
news of a tragedy ruining a life or a triumph crowning a career will
be conveyed by a sixpenny telegram. In the bad old days, when postage
was dear and the means of conveyance slow, people who could afford to
correspond at all sat down to begin a letter as though they were about
to engage in some solemn rite. Every patch of the paper was covered,