RELICS OF THE FAMOUS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20722, 15 November 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELICS OF THE FAMOUS.

FIVE THOUSAND LETTERS. LITERARY TREASURE TROVE. " UNTOUCHED AND UNKNOWN." A Devonshire manor house #n the fringe of Dartmoor will shortly give to tho world a treasure trove that will solve a legion of hitherto clouded historical problems and will throw still further light on tho lives of almost every great figure from the sixteenth to the e:irly nineteenth centures. The collection, says tho Daily Express, has been classed as tho most momentous literary and historical discovery of the century. It is a voritablo pageant on paper. Tho treasure itself lies in thirty-nine embossed volumes cc/litaining 5000 hitherto unpublished autograph letters, representative of almost every celebrity living, not only in Great Britain, hut on tho Continent of Europe and in the United States, during four centuries. Tho letters were originally the property of Mr. John Wild, of Clapham Lodge, Surrey, a noted autograph collector who died in 1855. Until last year, when they became the property of his great grandson, Mr. R. N. Carcw-Hunt, they, had reposed locked and securely guarded in an immense mahogany bureau in this Dartmoor house, untouched and unknown by tho world at large. Lady Hamilton and Nelson.

The value of tlie letters lias already been assessed as running into " hundreds of thousands of pounds"—and the full colection has not as yet been wholly classified.

Lady Hamilton's last letter to Nelson, an impassioned outburst written on the great admiral's departure}, for Trafalgar, and hitherto unknown, is but ono of thousands of almost priceless documents. Every one 01 them was chosen, not as being merely a specimen of some noted figure's correspondence, but as ono of the most vitally important letters the individual ever wrote. • The last letter Sir Walter Scott wrote before he left England on the visit to Rome which hastened his death is included iu the collection. Another is from Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, complaining bitterly of building worries aL Hampton Court I'alace.

Guy—the founder of Guy's Hospital—writes of his dealings in South Sea Bubble shares; Gainsborough voices his remorse for an action which he imagines has affronted Bartolozzi, the great, engraver. Danton and Robespierre are but two of tho famous figures of the Erench Revolution whose intimate writings are rediscovered for benefit. A * • . feature in the is a series of vitally important letters written by all the earlier Presidents of tho United Stales. " Undreamed-of Letters." Undreamed-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 longsuffering wife—dealing with the intrigue surrounding her divorce. Insights into the diplomatic relations between Spain and France, Holland and England that existed in Queen Elizebeth'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 of international importance who lived in the four centuries.

'• The collection is, 1 believe, not only unparalleled but of such importance that words are inadequate to describe it," said an intimate friend of Mr. CarewHunt recently.

" One of its most singular charms is that every letter it contains is intact, nnmutilated, and is set up in its particular volume, accompanied by rare prints or etchings of the writer concerned. " The greatest musicians, poets, soldiers. diplomats, authors, lawyers, doctors, or politicians of (heir day find space in it, and almost all the letters record not trivial episodes, but the crucial events of the world at that moment."