75 
THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING. 
By FRANK HUDSON, LL.B. 4th December, 1906. 
In the absence of the President, the Chair was taken by Mr. 
W. L. Grant, who welcomed to the meeting Mr. J. Langfield 
Ward, M.A., an honorary member of the Club, a former Presi- 
dent, and one of the Club’s most earnest supporters and helpers. 
Mr. Ward was heartily received by the members on rising to 
address the meeting at the invitation of the Chairman. 
The Lecturer introduced his subject by saying that his 
purpose was not to uphold the use of the phrase which formed 
the title of his paper, but was to inquire whether and to what 
extent there might be any truth in the allegation which the 
phrase conveyed, that there was at one time in the writing of 
letters a distinct art which had since been lost ; and further 
whether if there were anything which we had lost in our letters 
of to-day, there was any cause for regret in its absence. Mr. 
Hudson discussed the general characteristics which a good 
letter should possess, and said that they ought to reflect the 
writer’s personality. There should be an absence of “art” 
in the strict sense, of pose, of conscious effort. Letters should 
‘be “natural” and yet have literary character, and therefore 
the possession of a good literary style was a sine qua non in 
the writer. Other features in good letters varied and must 
vary as time. goes on, and were really non-essential. Col- 
lections of letters which had “lived” were referred to ; such 
collections were extremely few, and have all been written by 
people of no small mental powers and literary ability. In 
instituting any comparison between letters past and present 
we must not compare the letters of such people of ability with 
those of the present ‘‘ man in the street.’ We must take 
those of to-day written by people also of merit and ability, by 
masters of the English language who are incapable of commit- 
ting literary solecisms. 
A couple of centuries ago the average person wrote few 
letters, if indeed he could write at all, and certainly nothing 
he wrote was worth preserving from the literary point of view ; 
