"Memoirs" saw the light, over his polite repulse of the kindly
officious publisher, who wished, after his fashion, to criticise
and finger and suggest. "I am almost alarmed, as it were, at the
notion of receiving suggestions. I feel that hints from you might
be so valuable and so important, it might be madness to ask you
beforehand to abstain from giving me any; but I am anxious for you
to know what the dangers in the way of long delay might be, the
result of even a few slight and possibly most useful suggestions. .
. . You will perhaps (after what I have said) think it best not to
set my mind running in a new path, lest I should take to re-
writing." Note, by the way, the slovenliness of this epistle, as
coming from so great a master of style; that defect characterizes
all his correspondence. He wrote for the Press "with all his
singing robes about him"; his letters were unrevised and brief.
Mrs. Simpson, in her pleasant "Memories," ascribes to him the
eloquence du billet in a supreme degree. I must confess that of
more than five hundred letters from his pen which I have seen only
six cover more than a single sheet of note-paper, all are alike
careless and unstudied in style, though often in matter
characteristic and informing. "I am not by nature," he would say,
"a letter-writer, and habitually think of the uncertainty as to who
may be the reader of anything that I write. It is my fate, as a
writer of history, to have before me letters never intended for my
eyes, and this has aggravated my foible, and makes me a wretched
correspondent. I should like very much to write letters gracefully
and easily, but I can't, because it is contrary to my nature." "I
have got," he writes so early as 1873, "to shrink from the use of
the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking a lame man to
walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, 'the nature of the beast.'
When others TALK to me charmingly, my answers are short, faltering,