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 It is certainly easier, and far more agreeable, to read Charles Lamb's essays than to ask a stranger in which one of them he discovered the author's heterodox views on encyclopædias. It involves no great fatigue to look up a poem of Herrick's, or a letter of Shelley's, or a novel of Peacock's (these things are accessible and repay enquiry), and it would be a rational and self-respecting thing to do, instead of endeavouring to extort information (like an intellectual footpad) from writers who are in no way called upon to furnish it.

One thing is sure. As long as there are people in this world whose guiding principle is the use of other people's brains, there can be no decline and fall of letter-writing. The correspondence which plagued our great-grandfathers a hundred years ago, plagues their descendants to-day. Readers of Lockhart's "Scott" will remember how an Edinburgh minister named Brunton, who 223