You wrote letters to a man whom you knew
nineteen years and a half ago, and told him what you had for dinner, and
what your second cousin said, and how the crops got on. Every detail of
life was described and dwelt on, and improved. The art of writing, at
least of writing easily, was comparatively rare, which kept the number
of such compositions within narrow limits. Sir Walter Scott says he knew
a man who remembered that the London post-bag once came to Edinburgh
with only one letter in it. One can fancy the solemn, conscientious
elaborateness with which a person would write, with the notion that his
letter would have a whole coach and a whole bag to itself, and travel
two hundred miles alone, the exclusive object of a red guard's care. The
only thing like it now--the deferential minuteness with which one public
office writes to another, conscious that the letter will travel on her
Majesty's service three doors down the passage--sinks by comparison into
cursory brevity.
No administrative reform will be able to bring even the official mind of
these days into the grave inch-an-hour conscientiousness with which a
confidential correspondent of a century ago related the growth of
apples, the manufacture of jams, the appearance of flirtations, and
other such-like things. All the ordinary incidents of an easy life were
made the most of; a party was epistolary capital, a race a mine of
wealth.
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