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 214 that they would one and all have remained unwritten, could their author have foreseen their fate. They were not meant for us, they never would have reached us, had his known desires and prejudices been respected. Many of them are delightful, as when he tells with sedate humor of his absurd proposal to Macaulay that they should change identities at Sir George Napier's dinner, so as to confuse and baffle a young American woman, the desire of whose heart was to meet these two great lions, and of Macaulay's disgust at the bare notion of jesting with anything so serious as his literary reputation. Yet when the recipient of these letters yielded to the temptation of publishing them, she would have done well to suppress those trivial, colorless, and private communications which can have no possible value or interest to others. An invitation to dinner is of some importance the day that it arrives, but it loses its vitality when reprinted forty years after the dinner is eaten. There is horror in the thought that a man of genius can never promise himself that grateful privacy which is the lot of his happier and less distinguished brothers; but that after he has died in