FOR Something more than half a century the custom has been gradually increasing, of publishing with but little reserve, such letters of eminent men as have been written in the ordinary management of the affairs of life, or the careless confidence of domestic intimacy. In Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," we scarcely remember a single private letter being printed as illustrating any one statement in the work, or as affording an exhibition of the character of any one of the writers, whose lives he relates. A short time before the publication of "The Lives of the Poets," Mason had, in his Memoirs of Gray, introduced a new style of biography, which has affected, more or less, every work of the kind since written. The journals of Gray, a retired scholar, who took accurate notes of whatever he read, supplied much that was instructive and interesting to the earnest student; and Mason had the opportunity of selecting, from a correspondence conducted through the whole of Gray's life with one friend or another, a vast body of information,

on a great variety of subjects. There were few personal details; and though Mason made great use of Gray's letters, yet there was scarcely a single letter published without omissions. The example given by Mason was followed in two remarkable instances by a writer whose poetry was once popular, and whose prose works, in spite of great affectation, which deforms everything he has written, are still very pleasing. Hayley, in his Life of Milton, has woven together passages from Milton's letters, calculated to make his readers sympathize with the great poet, and which give a wholly different aspect to his life from that which the readers of Johnson had received. Milton's minor poems had been published by Thomas Warton, with notes, curiously illustrative of the mental process by which Milton's poetical language was elaborated; but in those notes, and through the whole book, Milton's controversial writings were assailed in a temper of bigotry scarcely intelligible in our days, and which Hayley's "Life" did much to counteract. To an extent