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we are to check the unwarranted publishing of private letters which has become the recognized disgrace of literature. It is hard for us to understand just when our curiosity ceases to be permissible; it is harder still for editors to understand just when their privileges cease to be beneficial. Not many years ago it was possible for Mr. Bagehot to say that he took comfort in thinking of Shelley as a poet about whom our information was mercifully incomplete. Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is incomplete no longer; but we have scant cause to congratulate ourselves on what we have gained by his disclosures. Mr. Froude, acting up to an heroic theory of friendship, has pilloried Carlyle for the pleasure and the pain of gaping generations; but there are some who turn away with averted eyes from the sordid, shameful spectacle. Within the last decade the reading world welcomed with acclamations a volume of letters from the pen of one who had made it his especial request that no such correspondence should ever be published. How many of those who laughed over the witty, whimsical, intimate, affectionate outpourings of Thackeray paused to consider