Mary Owens Crowther

How to Write Letters Mary Owens Crowther

The heyday of letter writing was in the eighteenth century in England. George Saintsbury, in his interesting "A Letter Book," says: "By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence-French and English-the very palmiest day of the art. Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper-belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'-our most famous she-ditto-belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded itself-certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship-to the letter-form.