HOLOGRAPH ORDER OF ADMISSION OF THOMAS CARLYLE TO HIS RECTORIAL ADDRESS AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, DATED MARCH 23, 1866.
George Augustus Sala and Edmund Yates were friends and contemporaries of Charles Dickens, and survived him. They are both entitled to a place amongst the last of the Victorian letter-writers. The minute handwriting of Sala was even more distinct than that of Thackeray. Here is a typical Sala letter:—
Hotel de Flandre, Montagne de la Cour, Brussels,
Thursday November Twenty Seventh 1884.
Dear Lady Wolseley,—My wife who during my absence is my Postmistress General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary of State for Home and Foreign Affairs and Chief Commissioner of Works all rolled into one, has forwarded me your note, and has scribbled on the margin "with two lovely photographs." I hasten to thank you for the graceful and thoughtful kindness which has prompted your welcome gift. I am proud to believe that you know how much I admire and esteem your illustrious husband; how eagerly I have followed the course of his splendid and well-deserved fortunes, and how highly I value the friendship with which during so many years he has honoured me. It is really to me a pleasure to have grown old when I remember that amongst my most prized relics at home are a visiting card inscribed "Major Wolseley, for Mr. Sala, St. Lawrence Hall, Montreal 1863"; the walking stick which Sir Garnet Wolseley brought me home from South Africa; the letter which Lord Wolseley wrote me from the Kremlin, Moscow on Coronation Day 1883, to which I am now able to add "two lovely photographs" and your kind note. Were I going alone on my long and arduous journey, my abiding hope would be, of course, to come home safe and sound to my wife. Happily we are not to be separated (although the friendly but cynical solicitor, who made my will just before I left town was good enough to remark you must add a codicil in case you are both drowned); so we shall both, during our wanderings be able to nourish the pleasant hope that we shall be permitted on our return to pay our homage to the Earl and Countess Wolseley. I have, dear Madam, in my time, prophesied a great deal more in print about your Lord than you are aware of, and I am confident that my latest prediction will come true—and more than true. Meanwhile, I am,
Your Ladyship's faithful and obliged servant
George Augustus Sala
A.L.S. OF JOHN WESLEY, JUNE 14, 1788.
Some hundreds of Edmund Yates's letters are in my possession, and I have utilised them to extra-illustrate his "Recollections" which I have extended to seventeen volumes. In the last edition of his entertaining book he alludes to the pleasure a letter from Mr. Charles Kent, the friend of Dickens, gave him in "troublous times." More than twenty years after I gladly gave 5s. for the original in the auction room:—