Excerpt from Letters of Literary Men: The Nineteenth Century The present volume completes a work which is intended, as stated in the earlier and companion volume, to illustrate the history of English literature, by means of letters, from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The letters, now first collected, take up the story from the death of Burns, with which the first volume comes to a close, and bring it down to Ruskin and Robert Buchanan, who, alone among the authors here included, lived long enough to link the twentieth century with the literary history of the nineteenth. It has been by no means an easy task to find room for all the great writers of English literature during the last hundred years; and in some cases it has been impossible to obtain letters suitable for the purpose - which has been to follow each author through all the more important stages of his career, allowing him to relate events, and record his impressions, in his own words. For that reason no letters of living authors have been included; and questions of copyright have made it necessary to give less space to certain writers of the past than their merits deserve. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.