In the mean time a large impression, amounting, it is believed, to three thousand copies, had been dispersed over the country.  To recall these was impossible; to have expected that any acknowledged production of Mr. Burke, full of matter likely to interest the future historian, could remain forever in obscurity, would have been folly; and to have passed it over in silent neglect, on the one hand, or, on the other, to have then made any considerable changes in it, might have seemed an abandonment of the principles which it contained.  The author, therefore, discovering, that, with the exception of the introductory letter, he had not in fact kept any clean copy, as he had supposed, corrected one of the pamphlets with his own hand.  From this, which was found preserved with his other papers, his friends afterwards thought it their duty to give an authentic edition.

The “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” were originally presented in the form of a memorial to Mr. Pitt.  The author proposed afterwards to recast the same matter in a new shape.  He even advertised the intended work under the title of “Letters on Rural Economics, addressed to Mr. Arthur Young”; but he seems to have finished only two or three detached fragments of the first letter.  These being too imperfect to be printed alone, his friends inserted them in the memorial, where they seemed best to cohere.  The memorial had been fairly copied, but did not appear to have been examined or corrected, as some trifling errors of the transcriber were perceptible in it.  The manuscript of the fragments was a rough draft from the author’s own hand, much blotted and very confused.

The Third Letter on the Proposals for Peace was in its progress through the press when the author died.  About one half of it was actually revised in print by himself, though not in the exact order of the pages as they now stand.  He enlarged his first draft, and separated one great member of his subject, for the purpose of introducing some other matter between.  The different parcels of manuscript designed to intervene were discovered.  One of them he seemed to have gone over himself, and to have improved and augmented.  The other (fortunately the smaller) was much more imperfect, just as it was taken from his mouth by dictation.  The former reaches from the two hundred and forty-sixth to near the end of the two hundred and sixty-second page; the latter nearly occupies the twelve pages which follow.[3] No important change, none at all affecting the meaning of any passage, has been made in either, though in the more imperfect parcel some latitude of discretion in subordinate points was necessarily used.