Letters on Literature - Dear Wincott, You write to me, from your ?bright home in the setting sun,? with the flattering information that you have read my poor ?Letters to Dead Authors.?  You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write some ?Letters to Living Authors;? but that, I fear, is out of the question,?for me. Letters on Literature - A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarked that the great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles?if they could read them.  Possibly not; but, like Prior, ?I may write till they can spell??an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was Matt?s little Mistress of Quality.  But Living Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one?s comments on them literally, in the French phrase, ?to their address.?  Yet there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form. Letters on Literature - Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator, were originally nothing but letters.  The vehicle permits a touch of personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice.  So I shall write my ?Letters on Literature,? of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient, or modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, or to such other correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.