His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor,
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.
The display of such a wit as this is all the more delightful in a letter because of the very intimacy of the thing. It is not done to amuse a company, but to delight a friend. Every true letter is a gift. If it rises to the plane of literature, it is literature created in honour of an individual, and is his to cherish or destroy. It is thus the most personal and private of all literary types, since it is the only one that can be held to be the peculiar and exclusive property of an individual. A lover of letters is as jealous as he is insatiable. Like Madame du Deffand with the letters of Walpole, he is always looking about for somebody with whom to share his pleasures, and is for ever discovering that no one is worthy of the honour;[428] and, like her, his passion is such that he would give the two letters that he has for the one which he is awaiting. The secret of such a jealous sense of ownership as this lies in the fact that every intimate letter is really suffused with two personalities, one of which is that of the recipient.
Such intimate correspondence as this was not without an effect upon English literature. The idealization of intimacy which made it possible spread the love of simplicity and of a more familiar tone. The type was, oddly enough, at one with the new romanticism in this demand for the natural. The style in which it was expressed is fifty years ahead of its time, and already prophesies the more familiar tone of such men as Lamb and Hazlitt. The following passage from Walpole is typical: