Page:Essays in idleness.djvu/204

 LETTERS.

is one of the current complaints of to-day that the art of letter-writing, as our great-grandfathers and our great-great-grandfathers knew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost. Railways, which bring together easily and often people who used to spend the greater portion of their lives apart; cheap postage, which relieves a man from any serious responsibility for what he writes,—the most insignificant scrawl seems worth the stamp he puts on it; the hurried, restless pace at which we live, each day filled to the brim with things which are hardly so important as we think them, and which have cost us the old rich hours of leisurely thought and inaction,—these are the forces which have conspired to destroy the letter, and to crowd into its place that usurping and unprofitable little upstart called the note. "The art of note-writing," says Mr. Bagehot, "may become classical; it is for the present age to