The art of letter writing, we are told, has died out; its candle-lit intimacy shrinks before the electric glare of today and the shrill blatancy of the telephone. All the more precious to us, therefore, are those specimens that have survived the limbo of carelessness and attained the permanence of print. It is, of course, still an open question with many people whether letters should be made public property at all by being published.
There are certain examples, however, to which no one could take exception - despite their intimate nature. Of such are the letters written by Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple; they have all the charm of romance, whilst they also excel as quiet pictures of sixteenth-seventeenth century domesticity. Lady Temple (as she became) has been vividly painted for us by Macaulay; her attachment to Temple, the loss of her beauty by small-pox, her gentle nature, and the treatment she received at the hands of her managing sister-in-law, Lady Giffard, make one of the most attractive intimate histories of that (or any other) time.