"This note - there's... nothing in it."

The Independent has published excerpts from an impressive collection of letters due to be auctioned off soon.  Well worth a look:

TS Eliot's postcard to Clive Bellon 6 January 1948. The card was addressed:

"O stalwart Sussex postman, who is / Delivering the post from Lewes, / Cycle apace to Charlton Firle / While knitting at your plain and purl / Deliver there to good Clive Bell / (You know the man, you know him well / He plays the virginals and spinet) / This note - there's... nothing in it."

Charlotte Brontë on critical reaction to her recently published novel Shirley. Letter to her literary adviser, William Smith Williams, dated 9 November, 1849.

"I perused all the newspapers attentively. The Spectator and Athenaeum amused me. The critics of these papers are, I doubt not, acute men in their way - theirs is not the shallow weakness of The Observer and the Daily News. But when called on to criticise works of imagination, they stand in the position of deaf men required to listen to music, or blind men to judge a painting. The Practical their minds can grasp; of the Ideal, they know nothing."