As an inheritance from the days when Mrs. Brown presented her compliments and begged that Mrs. Smith would do her the honor to take a dish of tea with her, we still—notwithstanding the present flagrant disregard of old-fashioned convention—send our formal invitations, acceptances and regrets, in the prescribed punctiliousness of the third person.

All formal invitations, whether they are to be engraved or to be written by hand (and their acceptances and regrets) are invariably in the third person, and good usage permits of no deviation from this form.