Rich.  Steele.”

Alexander Pope was another who wrote for posterity.  In spite of his deformity, he appears to have been touched to the heart by women, but vanity and selfishness tinged all of his letters.

[Sidenote:  Systematic Lovers]

Robert Burns was a systematic lover of anything in petticoats, and has left such a mass of amatory correspondence that his biographer was sorely perplexed.  There could not have been a pretty maid in the British Isles, to whom chance had been kind, who had not somewhere the usual packet of love letters from “Bobby” Burns.

Laurence Sterne was no less generous with his affection, if the stories are true.  At twenty, he fell in love with Elizabeth Lumley, and from his letters to her, one might easily fancy that love was a devastating and hopeless disease.  There was a pretty little “Kitty” who claimed his devotion, and countless other affairs, before “Eliza” appeared.  “Eliza” was a married woman and apparently the last love of the heart-scarred Sterne.

[Sidenote:  Left by the Dead]

No earthly thing is so nearly immortal as a love letter, and nothing is so sorrowful as those left by the dead.  The beautiful body may be dust and all but forgotten, while the work of the loving hands lives on.  Even those written by the ancient Egyptians are seemingly imperishable.  The clay tablet on which one of the Pharaohs wrote a love letter, asking the hand of a foreign princess, is to-day in the British Museum.

The first time a woman cries after she is married, she reads over all the love letters the other men have written her, for a love letter is something a tender-hearted woman cannot bring herself to destroy.

[Sidenote:  The New Child]

The love letters of the man she did not marry still possess lingering interest.  The letters of many a successful man of affairs are still hidden in the treasure-box of the woman he loved, but did not marry.  Both have formed other ties and children have risen up to call them blessed, or whatever the children may please, for even more dreadful than the new woman is the new child.  Between them, they are likely to produce a new man.

The new child is apt to find the letters and read them aloud to the wrong people, being most successfully unexpected and inopportune.  A box of old letters, distributed sparingly at the doors of mutual friends, is the distinguishing feature of a lovely game called “playing postman.”  Social upheavals have occurred from so small a cause as this.

It sometimes happens, too, that when a girl has promised to marry a man and the wedding day is set, she receives from a mutual friend a package of faded letters and a note which runs something like this: 

“My Dear: 

“Now that my old friend’s wedding day is approaching, I feel that I have no longer the right to keep his letters.  They are too beautiful and tender to be burned and I have not the heart to make that disposition of them.  Were I to return them to him, he would doubtless toss them into the fire, and I cannot bear to have them lost.