explain why they perished: he was then "a youth and all unknown to
fame." It is even doubtful if the five hundred and forty published
letters include all the letters of Burns that now exist. Scarcely a year
passes but some epistolary scrap in the well-known handwriting is
unearthed and ceremoniously added to the previous sum total, And yet,
notwithstanding losses past or within recall, it is probable that we
have long had the whole of Burns's most characteristic letters. It was
inevitable that these should be preserved and published. His fame was so
rooted in the popular regard in his lifetime, that a characteristic
letter from his hand was sure to be received as something singularly
precious. It must not be forgotten, however, that Burns's personality
was so intense as to colour the smallest fragment of his correspondence,
and it is on this account desirable that every note he penned that yet
remains unpublished should be produced. It might give no new feature to
our conception of his character; but it would help the shading--which,
in the portraiture of any person, must chiefly be furnished by the minor
and more commonplace actions of his everyday life.

The correspondence of Burns, as we have it, commences, presumably, near
the close of his twenty-second year, and extends to all but exactly the
middle of his thirty-eighth. The dates are a day somewhere at the end of
1780, and Monday, 18th July 1796. Between these limits lies the printed
correspondence of sixteen years. The sum total of this correspondence
allows about thirty-four letters to each year, but the actual
distribution is very unequal, ranging from the minimum, in 1782, of one,
a masonic letter addressed to Sir John Whitefoord of Ballochmyle, to the
maximum number of ninety-two, in 1788, the great year of the Clarinda
episode. It is in 1786, the year of the publication of his first volume
at Kilmarnock, the year of his literary birth, that his correspondence
first becomes heavy. It rises at a leap from two letters in the