OLD FAMILY LETTERS.

Evening Star, Issue 4161, 28 June 1876, Page 4

OLD FAMILY LETTERS.

(From the Leisure Hour.)

Old letters ! It is always with seme feeling of melancholy that we take in our bands a bundle of letters of bygom generations. The bands that wrott them have crumbled into dust. Th* hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows which are beie set down, and which in their time were all in all to beings as full of life and impulse as we who sit gazing on these yellow pages, all are gone, vanished into thin air, and theii place knows them no more. But all is not melancholy. If one would set before him the actual life of his ancestors, he can do it in no better way. than by taking their own everyday account of it. Let him set in order that old family correspondence which he has been so lucky ms to find stuffed away in the garret.. « «-1 read over lettevaflw and be will find ti>* mLry tonus lake substance; two centuries will be as yesterday, and his forefathers will gather round aud live about him as familiarly as his own generation. He will probably not think much of their scholarship; he will find that th worthy knight at the head of the family has a noble contempt for th« rules of spelling, and that my lady, his wife, thinks more of her storeroom than her books. But, in spit* of this, he will find the knight a good man of business, careful of his property, and training up his children in the way they should go ; while the dame has a warm heart which speaks out with a charming simpleness from amid her bad spelling and crabbed handwriting. The knight, in the courtly fashion of his day, will address oven his own brother as “ Sir,’' and will sigh himself “ your very obedient servant, and most loving brother.” And when he takes his annual journey up to town, maybe to attend Parliament, his wife v, ill dutifully send him word from time to time how things go at home, beg him to execute her commissions, and down such articles as can be only bought ia.Lcfo?.

don (it may be a pound of that lately imported novelty—tea), by the carrier, who starts eveiy fortnight, or perchance, by great good fortune once a week, from the Angel Tavern, in Leicester Fields. In return be sends her m occasional letter in which he takes the opportunity of telling her some of the public news, for the benefit of herself and her neighbors, to whom it will be read for miles round. The loving couple will address each other as “Dear } Heart,” or “ Dear Sweetheart n —-for in those days this, one of the prettiest of English words, held its own -and will ever be “ thy loving wife, or husband, till death.”