_Certes_ a man had good need to drive a hard bargain
with the Post Office in those pinching times! Of course the "lower
orders"--poor benighted souls--were not supposed to have any
correspondence at all, and the game was kept up by gentlemen of
fortune, by merchants, by eager and moneyed lovers, and by stray
persons of literary tastes, who could manage to beg franks from
members of Parliament and other dignitaries. One gentleman, not of
literary tastes, once franked a cow and sent her by post; but this
kind of postal communication was happily rare. The best of the
letter-writers felt themselves bound to give their friends good worth
for their money, and thus we find the long chatty letters of the
eighteenth century purely delightful. I do not care much for Lord
Chesterfield's correspondence; he was eternally posing with an eye on
the future--perhaps on the very immediate future. As Johnson sternly
said, "Lord Chesterfield wrote as a dancing-master might write," and
he spoke the truth. Fancy a man sending such stuff as this to a raw
boy--"You will observe the manners of the people of the best fashion
there; not that they are--it may be--the best manners in the world,
but because they are the best manners of the place where you are, to
which a man of sense always conforms.
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