doctor of philosophy teaching freshman composition in college. I think father would have been given an A. The reply which came six months later was equally irreproachable, and had been the subject of equal care by our English relatives.
One has only to read the books written a century or more ago to see how great a part letter-writing played in the best literature extant. The shelves of our libraries are full of illustrations of the fact that many great writers have done some of their best work in the letters written to their friends. Richardson's first novel—the first work in English, in fact, to be worthy of the name of novel—was a series of letters written in the stiff formal style of the eighteenth century. Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son can scarcely be matched in the essays of any great writer of his time, for their delightful refined literary style, their keen insight into human nature, their truthful depicting of the thought and customs of the day. In our own time the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson are as representative of that writer's charm and genius as anything else that he has written, and many another
