wishes to close the correspondence; and, under other ci cumstances, it amounts to a slight degree of incivility. A parade of formal and respectful phrases, in a reply to a letter, in which familiar or affectionate terms are used, is tantamount to a very strong intimation, that the writer declines, or is averse from, being so addressed. D'Alembert said of a cer. tain individual, "He attempts to be familiar; but I repulso him with spect."

MANNER OF REPLYING TO LETTERS.

Every letter, that is not insulting, merits a reply, if it be required, or necessary. All the preceding observations, with regard to rank, age, &c are, of course, applicable to replies. If the letter contains a request, accede to it gracefully, and without ostentation, or refuse without harshness. An answer to a letter of condolence, or congratulation, should be grateful. The subjects should succeed each other in proper order; and the questions put, be consecutively answered. In familiar correspondence, a greater latitude of arrangement is allowed; but even in this, no question should be left unanswered. In all replies, it is usual to acknowledge the receipt, and to mention the date, of the last letter received: this should be an invariable rule; by neglecting it, your corre spondent may be left in doubt; or very properly deem you guilty of offensive inattention.

In answers to letters of business, the substance of the communication, to which the writer is about to reply, is generally stated. It is advisable to adopt a similar mode with regard to any correspondence of importance: thus, with proper care and attention to other particulars, you will guard against any possibility of your expressions being mistaken, or misrepre sented; or your answers applied, or conceived to apply, to other questions than those for which you intend them. The manner of doing this is usually as follows:-"In reply to your letter, dated, &c. in which you state that, &c. [briefly setting forth the principal points which you are about to answer] I beg to say," &c. This practice will give a formal air to a familiar epistle, if strictly pursued; but some attention should be paid to it in all epistolary correspondence, as 't insures clearness, which is one of the greatest beauties, as obscurity is the chief defect, of letter-writing. That the party whom you address is at a distance, and, therefore, in capable of getting any passage, which is not sufficiently ex plicit, made clear by a question, should ever be borne in mind. It is painful to hear a person, when reading a letter

from an absent friend, exclaim, occasionally, "I suppose he alludes here to his brother;"—“I wonder whether he means last Monday, or the Monday preceding," &c. For want of a little care and precision, passages, by which a great deal of nformation is intended to be conveyed, are a series of mor ifying enigmas to the party to whom they are addressed.

IMPORTANCE OF PROMPT ANSWERS.

It is a bad practice to suffer letters to remain long unan swered: irregularity, in this particular, is a mark of the greatest disrespect to a correspondent; it is a fault which ought to be sturdily attacked and overcome. "There is, in many people," says an eminent lady, "particularly in youth, a strange aversion to regularity; a desire to delay what ought to be done immediately, in order to do something else, which might as well be done afterwards. Be assured, it is of more consequence to you than you can conceive, to get the better of this idle, procrastinating spirit, and to acquire habits of constancy and steadiness, even in the most trifling matters; without them there can be no regularity or constancy of action or character; no dependence on your best intentions, which a sudden humor may tempt you to lay aside for a time, and which a thousand unforeseen accidents will afterwards render it more and more difficult to execute no one can say what important consequences may follow a trivial neglect of this kind. For example:-I have known one of these procrastinators disoblige, and gradually lose very valuable friends, by delaying to write to them so long, that having no good excuse to offer, he could not get courage enough to write at all; and dropped their correspondence entirely."

FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON STYLE.

It is almost needless to say, that in epistolary, as well as in every other style of composition, the rules of grammar should be strictly observed. As to orthography, it will be sufficient, perhaps, to repeat what has been said on the subject by more than one good writer:-among persons moving in good society, and who may be supposed to have received a tolerable education, although to spell correctly be no merit, to spell incorrectly is a great disgrace.

A parenthesis is objectionable, if it break the sense and distort the sentence. It is rare that the subject of a paren. thesis may not be better contained in a previous or following paragraph, or an elongation of the sentence, than thrown C

abruptly into the body of it. As a proof of the obscurity 1 sense, which may be produced by an injudicious use of the parenthesis, we quote the following lines from a translation of a celebrated Latin author's epistles :

But heaven, indulgent to my chaste desire,

Has wrapp'd (my husband safe) proud Troy in fire.

In the same work we also find a passage, where two or three sentences, containing facts of importance, are all parenthetically packed into a third, so awkwardly, as to puzzle a good reader how to convey, by emphasis, pauses, intonation, or otherwise, the meaning of the author :

Sunk now is Troy, the curse of Grecian dames,
(Her king, her all, a worthless prize!) in flames.
O, had by storms (his fleet to Sparta bound)
The Trojan perish'd in the mad profound!

Comparisons are sometimes very felicitous; but they must be made with care; their merit consists in the unity of their terms; if they do not agree perfectly with each other, the comparison, instead of being powerful, becomes ridiculous. A metaphor may also be used with advantage, if it occur naturally; and an anecdote may be as happily applied in a letter as in familiar conversation. Allusions are elegant, when introduced with ease and they are well understood by those to whom they are addressed. An allusion may be made to some pictorial, poetical, or mythological relation; to an anecdote of society; to an adventure of some well-known hero of romance; or, indeed, to any subject of notoriety. The antithesis renders a passage piquant; but those who use it too frequently are apt to become enigmatical. Proverbs, and jeux-de-mots are inelegant; if the latter be admitted, it must be sparingly. Occasional jeux-de-mots,* in a lively lett, if they be ingenious, and, at the same time, produced apparently without effort, season the style; but if they occur frequently, or are only mediocre, they tend to debase it Such as tell exceedingly well in society, make but poor figures when reduced to writing. If, in epistolary correspondence, a writer permit himself to play upon words, he must do so ingeniously, or his reader will laugh at him, instead of at his point. When occupied on a serious subject, such a practice is most reprehensible; it is tolerated only when addressing an equal and an acquaintance: to a stranger, or a superior, it would be insulting; to an inferior, too familiar. Some very high authorities reprehend the use of this small artillery

*Play of words.

of wk,—if it may be dignified with such a title,—either in conversation or otherwise, as being in bad taste; generally speaking, therefore, we may venture to say, that it ought not to be admitted in letter-writing.

The usual contractions in the English language are permitted in letters between friends, relations, and equals. They are unobjectionable, also, in letters on business; but held dis respectful, even by those who are not exceedingly rigid, when ased by an inferior addressing a superior. All arbitrary contractions, in every case, are in bad taste; nothing can be more inelegant than to press a multitude of abbreviations. which are not made current, and, consequently, familiar by custom, into any letter; those, on the contrary, which are generally sanctioned, the letter-writer is at full liberty to adopt, in all such epistolary correspondence as admits of a freedom of style; and there are some few even which it would be unwise to reject in communications to a superior.

PUNCTUATION.

Punctuation is a matter of the utmost importance in every species of literary composition: it has been properly termed, the very marshalling and arranging of the words of a language; without it, there can be no clearness, strength, or accuracy. Its utility consists in separating the different portions of what is written, in such a manner, that the subjects may be properly classed and subdivided, so as to convey the precise meaning of the writer to the reader; to show the relation which the various parts bear to each other; to unite such as ought to be connected, and keep apart such as have no mutual dependence. It is a circumstance very much to be lamented, that so little attention is paid to punctuation. A late writer on this subject, very truly states, that manuscripts in general are so notoriously defective, that not a little of the obscurity resulting, in many instances, from any thing written, is to be attributed to the perfect confusion that exists in the disposition of the words. Many persons never make use of any stops at all; thus leaving the task of discovering where their sentences begin and end to the ingenuity of their correspondents: others use only the full point; thus huddling the minor, and frequently important, divisions of a period, one upon another, in most perplexing disorder: a third class of writers press all the points into their service; but place them in such improper positions, that they produce that identical sort of confusion which they are intended to prevent. The same words, by means of different modes of punétuation.

may be made to express two meanings exactly oppose to each other; an ambiguous passage may frequently be ren dered clear by a comma; and the sense of an unintelligible sentence be made manifest by the simple remedy of a couple of coions judiciously applied. The object of writing is, most certainly, to express the meaning of the writer to the reader; punctuation was invented for the purpose of giving to written language a precision and certainty which words alone could not convey; we should, therefore, endeavor not only to writ correctly, but to point what we write with some degree of precision. It should be remembered that points are the substitutes of,-or, rather, the only means we possess of conveying by writing, the various pauses, intonations, emphases, &c. which we adopt in discourse: without their aid, we may become ludicrous, where we intend to be impressive ;-exclamatory, where it is our intention to inquire;-and subject to being misunderstood in every line which we commit * paper. Were many letters to be read aloud, precisely as they are written, they would sound like a mere "farrago of nonsense :" and could their writers hear them so read, they would, in all probability, be induced to apply themselves to the study of a proper mode of punctuation: but, unfortunately for themselves, in this respect, writers very seldom hear their own lett read; and they, very foolishly, fancy that every body, “wi a grain of sense," will, instinctively, read their composition with the intonations, emphasis, and tone, they themselves de sire. The contrary is almost invariably the case. It is im possible for us, on every occasion, to convey our precise mean ing by means of written language; but we may advance fa towards it, by judiciously pointing our periods. As there i no positive system of punctuation to direct the writer, th modern editions of good authors should be carefully studied in order to acquire the leading principles of the science. The construction of sentences may be examined, and the mode adopted of dividing them, attended to with considerable advantage. It is a good plan, for improvement in pointing, to copy a page of some standard work, without capitals or points and, after it has been laid aside for a few days, to endeavo to write it again with the proper points; by a subsequent com parison with the original, the writer may discover his errors and guard against similar blunders in his future exercises. 1 is not to be expected that he will attain, by these, or any other means, the power of pointing a page, in complete accordanc with a printed work; but he will, no doubt, acquire a degree of knowledge and experience in punctuation, which cannot