and every word was weighed, so that the writer screwed the utmost
possible value for his money out of the post-office. The letters
written in the last century resembled the deliberate and lengthy
communications of Roman gentlemen like Cicero: and there is little
wonder that the good folk made the most of their paper and their time.
We find Godwin casually mentioning the fact that he paid twenty-one
shillings and eightpence for the postage of a letter from Shelley;
readers of _The Antiquary_ will remember that Lovel paid twenty-five
shillings postage for one epistle, besides half a guinea for the
express rider. _Certes_ a man had good need to drive a hard bargain
with the Post Office in those pinching times! Of course the "lower
orders"--poor benighted souls--were not supposed to have any
correspondence at all, and the game was kept up by gentlemen of
fortune, by merchants, by eager and moneyed lovers, and by stray
persons of literary tastes, who could manage to beg franks from
members of Parliament and other dignitaries. One gentleman, not of
literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by post; but this
kind of postal communication was happily rare. The best of the
letter-writers felt themselves bound to give their friends good worth
for their money, and thus we find the long chatty letters of the
eighteenth century purely delightful. I do not care much for Lord
Chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on
the future--perhaps on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly
said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and
he spoke the truth. Fancy a man sending such stuff as this to a raw
boy--"You will observe the manners of the people of the best fashion
there; not that they are--it may be--the best manners in the world,
but because they are the best manners of the place where you are, to
which a man of sense always conforms. The nature of things is always
and everywhere the same; but the modes of them vary more or less in