elderly sportsman of agile imagination or unparalleled experience
in remote adventure. {1} All these a person who had once
encountered them would recognise, perhaps, when he was fortunate
enough to find himself in their company.

There are children, too, of a dead author, an author seldom lauded
by critics, who, possibly, have as many living friends as any
modern characters can claim. A very large company of Christian
people are fond of Lord Welter, Charles Ravenshoe, Flora and Gus,
Lady Ascot, the boy who played fives with a brass button, and a
dozen others of Henry Kingsley's men, women, and children, whom we
have laughed with often, and very nearly cried with. For Henry
Kingsley had humour, and his children are dear to us; while which
of Charles Kingsley's far more famous offspring would be welcome--
unless it were Salvation Yeo--if we met them all in the Paradise of
Fiction?

It is not very safe, in literature as in life, to speak well of our
friends or of their families. Other readers, other people, have
theirs, whom we may not care much for, whom we may even chance
never to have met. In the following Letters from Old Friends
(mainly reprinted from the "St. James's Gazette"), a few of the
writers may, to some who glance at the sketches, be unfamiliar.
When Dugald Dalgetty's epistle on his duel with Aramis was written,
a man of letters proposed to write a reply from Aramis in a certain
journal. But his Editor had never heard of any of the gentlemen
concerned in that affair of honour; had never heard of Dugald, of
Athos, Porthos, Aramis, nor D'Artagnan. He had not been introduced
to them. This little book will be fortunate far beyond its deserts
if it tempts a few readers to extend the circle of their visionary