Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION. There are many by-paths to the knowledge of mankind in general, and of illustrious individuals in particular, where the dignified Muse of History never deigns to lead us. She shows us kings and heroes, describes wonderful spectacles and great battles, embodies religious movements and mighty revolutions, ? subjects that we ought to know and that we like to know; but there are many subordinate personages, incidents, circumstances, perhaps more interesting because nearer to us in feeling, that we can only learn through the aid of familiar memoirs, autobiographies, and especially private and contemporaneous letters. These last give us the surest informaiion about the ways and means of actual life, the most minute details and various images of the real thoughts, feelings, passions, and pursuits of people and of periods. Every age (and every society) has its peculiar tone, acting, for the time, as a sort of atmosphere, which, in spite of any isolation or eccentricity of character, will influence every person it surrounds. This tone is nowhere to be seized so easily, and understood so well, as in the familiar letters of each epoch. How stiff, stupid, and dead is the most elaborate description of dress, manners, and. etiquette, presented in the pictures IV PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION. drawn by general authors and astute diplomatists, compared with the real talk, the frank opinions, the ill-natured gossip, the spontaneous admiration, that enlighten as well as amuse us in contemporary correspondence. The name of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is familiar to our people, yet her celebrated
Letters have never been made easily accessible, and therefore are little known. In preparing this volume for popular use, great care has been taken to preserv…