Pagina 7 [7]
OCR
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 manuscripts 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
