AMONG THE CONSIDERABLE number of letters from different correspondents which Mrs. Oliphant left behind her, the earliest — or at any rate the earliest of any general interest — is from the redoubtable Francis Jeffrey. He was at the very end of his long and brilliant literary career when there came to him an offering — the first work of a young and unknown writer — which seems to have touched the springs of kindness and sympathy in a way very charming and attractive. The letter of the old critic was, naturally, most highly valued by the neophyte. She seems never to have lost a sense of the pleasure it gave her; and Jeffrey’s death, shortly after she received it, made it even more of a relic. Here is the missive, sent to her through her publisher: —