Love Letters: Old and New
The Average Love Letter
The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep, unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her. The first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia. The single blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this cause.
A real love letter is absolutely ridiculous to everyone except the writer and the recipient. A composition, which repeats the same term of endearment thirteen times on a page, has certainly no particular claim to literary art.
When a man writes a love letter, dated, and fully identified by name and address, there is no question but that he is in earnest. A large number of people consider nothing so innocently entertaining as love letters, read in a court-room, with due attention to effect, by the counsel for the other side.
Affairs of that kind are given scarlet headlines in the saffron journals, and if the letters are really well done, it means the sale of an "extra." No man can hope to write anything which will possess such general interest as his love letters. If Shakespeare had written voluminously to his sweetheart—to any of his sweethearts—and the letters should be found by this generation, what a hue and cry would be raised over his peaceful ashes!
Sins of Commission