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PREFACE
In this volume appear the first instances of letters printed
only from rough drafts. A considerable number of these are
extant; having been preserved by their writers not merely
through vanity or antiquarian instinct, but from the desire to be
able to revive recollection of their letters, if answers should be
slow in coming. The manuscripts vary from letters copied fair
for despatch, but through some accident of circumstance not
gent, and therefore exposed to subsequent alteration, down to
the hastiest scratches dashed off on the spur of the moment and
freely corrected and revised. Sometimes groups of letters are
found repeating much the same news and written continuously
without regard to pages; the name of the person addressed
being added in brief at the head of each, but often with no
dates except those of place. Such letters were probably written
more or less at a sitting; and then, when suitable messengers
presented themselves, copied out and despatched with the
precise dates of sending filled in. In some cases, too, several
drafts survive of the same letter, marking stages in its growth.
But on the whole such evidence as is available goes to show
that rough drafts give the substance of what the writer wished
to say; though there may be sometimes an interval between
composition and despatch, and in the final text some variation of
phrases.
It is neither possible nor desirable to reproduce such manu¬
scripts as closely as if they were finished letters; to show the
numerous corrections and insertions, or the misspellings and
repetitions which arise in the haste of composition known not
to be final. In consequence I have treated them with some
freedom; and occasionally, when drafts were very rough, with
sentences wandering up and down the page, it has been necessary
to construct the letter as best one might. Deletion, again, was
so frequently preparatory to rewriting, that I have sometimes
retained in the text passages of interest which the writer had
struck out. In a few cases of alteration, where the words
fA