Family Letters have gone astray in the hands of careless or now unknown friends, to whom they were lent in the course of their annual rounds, and can no longer be traced. None of them were originally intended for other eyes than those of our Inner Circle. Hence the spontaneousness, the life-like look and feeling, which distinguish these Letters, and make them, in my judgment, worthy of being preserved and published, Their literary grace is of the unconscious kind — the rarest grace of all.