But for Pepys and Evelyn we should know but little of the social life of the seventeenth century. A host of letter writers—Walpole, Mrs. Delany, and Mrs. Montagu, at the head of them—may be said to have photographed the next century for us. Lord Malmesbury, Lord Auckland, and some others succeeded; and now we are beginning to have revelations exclusively of the first years of the nineteenth century. The most important contributor to our knowledge in this respect is the late Sir George Jackson, whose volumes, ably edited by his widow, will afford us samples of the times in which our grandmothers were young and had swains at their feet—unless war called them away.

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