ONE PAGE OF A.L.S. FROM MR. W. E. GLADSTONE AT BALMORAL TO CARDINAL MANNING, N.D.
Four years ago I saw ten letters of the late Lord Beaconsfield catalogued at £70. Personally I regard him as almost the last of the now extinct race of letter-writers, for the epistolary art has succumbed beyond hope of recovery to the combined influences of the telegraph, the telephone, the type-writer and the halfpenny newspaper. A "newspaper" letter, as Mrs. Montagu, Lord Lyttelton, and Lord Bath used to call them, would be as ridiculous as a conversation on les belles lettres. How Lord Beaconsfield's life is ever to be written with any hope of completeness, I cannot imagine. Hundreds of his letters have been sold since his death, and a specimen of average interest can now be obtained for 20s. or less. I have gradually acquired thirty or forty and am certain that sooner or later a rise in price is inevitable. People will soon discover that in the fragmentary and wholly unsatisfactory published collections of Beaconsfield's letters the originals have been ruthlessly mangled or transformed. I shall only include two examples in this book, beginning with a very early one from the inevitable Bath:—
Benjamin Disraeli to his Sister.
(Franked by E. Lytton Bulwer.)
Bath, Thursday [Jany 24 1833]
My Dearest,—You ought to have recd my letter on Sunday and I should have answered your's immediately, but it is almost impossible to get a frank out of Bulwer and I thought my father wd go quite mad if he received an unprivileged letter under present circumstances. We quit this place tomorrow and shd have done so to-day, but dine with a Mr. Murray here. I like Bath very much. At a public ball I met the Horfords, Hawksleys etc. Bulwer and myself went in very late and got quite mobbed.
I have nearly finished Iskander, a very pretty thing indeed, and have printed the 1st Vol of Alroy.
I have answered the agric. affair which was forwarded to me from London.
Directly I am in town I will write about the bills.