Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

422 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
This sonnet and a half, so called by the author,
with its elaborate puns, is written without any dis-
tinction of line on the flaps of the portentous sheet of
foolscap which formed Coleridge's letter. The present
generation can only regard with alarm the communica-
tions which our fathers crammed into every corner of
a sheet, at the risk of losing an occasional word, im-
portant to the sense, but swallowed up under the
seal, or torn in opening the letter. The writer,
though old, can but just remember as a child the
eager desire for franks, the seizure of every "private
hand," even the surreptitious introduction into brown
paper parcels of the letters which in those economical
days were so "dear" that it was necessary to justify
them by having really something, and as much as
possible, to say—a good pennyworth in short. That
it was not worth the postage was the contemptuous
verdict on many a letter—a judgment to which all the
greater force was given by the fact that the postage
was generally paid by the recipient, not by the sender,
of the letter, under a convenient idea that a prepaid
letter was less safe.
The transition from Coleridge to De Quincey is
one not difficult to make. There are many points of
resemblance between them, going so far even as to
a certain likeness between their handwriting, though
the tiny scribbled notes of the Opium - Eater, so
often sent by the hand of an abashed son who had
to wait for the reply, are very different from the
elder poet's foolscap. Few readers need to be told
the story of De Quincey, that curious figure in liter-