THE GENTLEST ART

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22307, 22 January 1938, Page 16

THE GENTLEST ART

LETTERS FROM LADY CHAKNWOOD'S COLLECTION

Call Back Yesterday. A Book of Letters Selected and Arranged by Lady Charnwood, Eyre and Spottiswoode. 320 pp. (12/6 net.)

Lady Charnwood has been unkind in withholding so long from her countrymen the splendid stores of tetters she has collected. The chief merit of her collection is its breadth. It does not illustrate the economic trends of eighteenth century industry, nor does it illustrate AngloFrench relations during the Second Empire, nor, lastly, does it supply a thread to interpret the love-life of English poets. Here is the kind of collection that the person who likes interesting things would make if hfi had great good luck, much assiduity, a fair amount of money, and wide open eyes for catalogues and auction sales. In other words. "Call Back Yesterday" is a good book to own. The owner will dip into it often, he will call his guest to attention while he reads aloud, and the guest will insist on borrowing the book. Most of the letters were written within the last 200 years. Their writers cannot be classified. Manv of them, though far from all. were famous, and most of them were men of letters or diplomacy or politics. Not one letter is included because it has nothing but a noble signature: each would be worth printing over an unknown name. In his introduction Sir John Squire quotes from a letter written by Sidney Smith to Jeffrey in 1806. The approval of so Rood a judge will support a further quotation.

I cannot describe to you how disgusted I am by the set of canting rascals who have crept into all kinds of power during the profligate reign of Mr Pitt, who patronised hypocrisy, folly, fraud, an,d anything else that contributed to his power—peace to his ashes and from them, but whatever feelings and proprieties it violates I must say he was one of the mqst luminous eloquent blunderers with which any people was ever afflicted. For 15 years I have found my income dwindling away under his eloquence, and regularly in every Session of Parliament he has charmed every classical feeling and stript me of every guinea I possest. At the close of every brilliant display an expedition failed or a Kingdom fell, and by the time that

his style had gained the summit of perfection Europe was degraded to the lowest abyss of misery. God send us a stammerer, a tongueless man, let Moses come, for this heaven-born Aaron has failed.

The letters are, very briefly and tactfully, made to read consecutively, by interposed comments or pieces of information, of the kind that the enthusiastic owner would naturally make if he always knew he had said enough.