Who says we should never complain? Consider the following. In October 1955 George Lyttleton, a retired Eton master, then seventy-two, was dining with, among others, his former student, the distinguished publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When Lyttleton grumbled that nobody wrote to him anymore, Hart-Davis gallantly promised to do so. Five days later he made good on the pledge; Lyttleton responded; and thus was launched, by a stray bleat of self-pity, a weekly correspondence that, when it ended with Lyttleton’s death in 1962, had generated about six hundred of the most delightful letters in English. These, edited by Hart-Davis, were published between 1978 and 1984, but the six volumes have since gone out of print. This selection is therefore overdue and more than welcome.

The main currency of exchange here is, not surprisingly, literary chatter. Although the two men share many tastes—both revere Carlyle and Beerbohm (“He was the perfect petit maître … adorning all he touched,” Hart-Davis sighs upon Sir Max’s death in 1956)—they also play off each other. For his part, Lyttleton assumes the role of rusticated codger, “full of Victorian prejudice.” “In ten years’ time,” he predicts, “I shall be left high and dry by modern literature, and in writing to me you will feel you have joined the spiritualists and are communicating with a ghost.” Counters Hart-Davis: “Your fear of senectitude and hardening of the literary arteries seems to me morbid.” Lyttleton lovingly tends his herd of bêtes noires,doting especially on