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 194 they were written. A more serious loss is the total absence of any minute information or gossip upon current topics in the mass of modern correspondence. The letter which is so useful to historians, which shows us, and shows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordinary, every-day life of prominent men and women, this letter has also disappeared, and there is nothing to take its place. We can reconstruct the England, or at least the London of George II. and George III. from the pages of Horace Walpole. Who is there likely to hand down in this fashion to a coming generation the England of Queen Victoria? Neither does the fact of Walpole's being by no means a bigot in the matter of truth-telling interfere with his real value. He lies consciously and with a set purpose here and there; he is unconsciously and even inevitably veracious in the main. There are some points, observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost everybody's letters are true. "The delineation of a recurring and familiar life is beyond the reach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpole was not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it was too much trouble, even for him, to tell lies