RELICS OF THE FAMOUS

Evening Star, Issue 20655, 1 December 1930, Page 5

RELICS OF THE FAMOUS

FIVE THOUSAND LETTERS LITERARY TREASURE TROVE A Devonshire manor house on the fringe of Dartmoor will shortly give to the-world a treasure 1 trove that will solve a legion of hitherto clouded Instprical problems and will throw still farther light on the lives of; almost dvery great figure from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The collection, says thb ‘ Daily Express, has been classed as the most momentous literary and historical, discovery of the century. It is a, veritable pageant on j fhe treasure itself lies in thirty-nine , embossed volumes containing 5,660.; (litherto unpublished autograph letters, representative of almost every celebrity liking, not Only in Great Britain, but qn the Continent, of Europe-and in the Uhitfed States, during .four centuries. ,Thp letters were originally, the property of Mr John Wild, of Clapham Lodge, Surrey, a noted autograph collector, who died in 1.855, Until last year, when they became the property of his great-grandson, Mr R- N. Carewffunt. they bad reposed locked and

securely guarded in an immense mahogany bureau in this Dartmoor house, untouched and unknown by the-world at large. LADY HAMILTON AND NELSON. The value of the - letters has already been assessed as running into “ hundreds of thousands' of pounds ” —and the full collection lias not as yot been wholly classified. I Lady Hamilton’s ‘last letter to Nelson, ah impassioned Outburst written on the great admiral’s .departure for Trafalgar, and hitherto Unknown,' is but one of thousands of almost priceless documents. v Every one of them was chosen not as being merely a specimen of some noted . figure’s correspondence, , but as ■one of the most vitally important let- ■ ters the individual ever wrote, j • The last letter Sir Walter Scott,wrote before lie left England on the visit to ; Romo which hastened, his death is in- : I eluded in the collection. Another is from Sir Christopher Wren, t’’« architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, complaining bitterly of building worries at -Hampton Court Palace ; Guy (the founder of Guy’s Hospital) writes of bis dealings in South. Sea Rubble shares; Gainsborough voices his remorse for an action ,Iwhich he imagines has affronted Rarlolozzi, the great engraver. Dauton and Robespierre are but two of the famous figures of the french Revolution whose intimate writ-

irigs are rediscovered for history’s benefit. _ A feature in the ‘ collection is a series of vitally important letters written by all the earlier Presidents of the United States. “UNDREAMED-OF LETTERS.”' Undroamed-of letters of English kings and queens lie cheek by jowl in these green-embossed volumes. There are six at least tragically eloquent epistles of Queen Caroline—George IV.’s long-suf-fering wife—dealing with the intrigue surrounding her divorce. Insights into the diplomatic relations between Spain and France, Holland and England that existed in Queen Elizabeth’s days are now bared to view with the Signatures of their protagonists. Samuel Pepys writes; so with an interval of a century does David Garrick. and so in turn does every figure i of international importance who lived I in the four centuries. | “The collection is, T believe, not only unparalleled, but of such importance that words are'inadequate to describe it,’ said an intimate friend of Mr Camv-Hunt. recently. “ One of its most singular charms is that every letter it contains is intact, immntilated, and is set up in its particular volume, accompanied by rare prints or etchings of the writer concerned. , “The greatest musicians, poets, sol- - diers, diplomats, authors, lawyers, doc-

tors, .or politicians of their day find space in it. and almost all the letters record not trivial episodes, but the crucial events of the world at that moment.” ,