N obody ever yet found very great difficulty in starting a letter. Young lovers may have hesitated from time to time between such modes of address as ‘Dear,’ ‘Dearest,’ ‘Sweetest,’ ‘Darling,’ and the like; but only for a moment. Usually, the overburdened heart hits at once upon the exact word or phrase which best expresses its ecstatic feeling. And so with less impassioned matters. There is a well-recognised gradation in the methods of epistolary salutation. The stranger is addressed as ‘Sir,’ the person of whom something is known as ‘Dear Sir.’ ‘My Dear Sir’ accompanies a rather better acquaintance; ‘Dear Mr. Brown’ marks an approach to intimacy; while ‘Dear Brown’ signifies the acme of friendship and of camaraderie. Here, again, there may be a temporary pause before passing from ‘Sir’ to ‘Dear Sir,’ and so forth, but in general the transitions are sufficiently well emphasized to be obvious to the average intelligence.

Very different is it with the other end of the letter. There we find opportunity for the widest divergence. Royal or official, pompous or irate, people have been known to finish an epistle, abruptly, with the simple appendix of their name; but these are the exceptions which prove the rule. And the rule is certainly to preface the name by some expression of feeling, however brief and perfunctory. The least you can do is to describe yourself as ‘yours.’ We find Sterne thus describing himself to Garrick; while, by way of slight variety, Cowper, writing to Joseph Hill, ends with a ‘Yours, dear Joe.’ Still further variety is secured when, as in the case of Lord Eglinton addressing his countess in 1619, the hackneyed ‘I remain, yours’ takes the form of ‘I rest, yours’—a phrase which is not, however, likely to be often used. And let it not be supposed that plenty of meaning cannot be thrown into the ‘yours’ alone. Take, for instance, the reply made by ‘The’ Macdonald, when Glengarry claimed the chieftainship of the clan. ‘As soon,’ said the former, ‘as you can prove yourself my chief I shall be ready to acknowledge you as such, but in the meantime I am yours, Macdonald.’ There, for once in a way, the ‘yours’ meant something.

When we go farther than the mere ‘yours,’ the possible variations are, of course, endless. There is ‘yours truly’—perhaps the most widely used of all such combinations; but there are persons who rebel against its tyranny, and who with daring originality substitute the heartier and less conventional ‘very truly,’ ‘most truly,’ or ‘right truly.’ Second only to ‘yours truly’ come ‘yours faithfully’ and ‘yours sincerely,’ with their comparative ‘very faithfully’ and superlative ‘most sincerely;’ and many people are well content to keep within the safe borders of these wholly innocent and uncompromising forms. On the other hand, less indifferent minds will go farther afield for their qualifying adverbs, and say, with Sterne, ‘very cordially yours,’ or, with Father Matthew, ‘yours devotedly,’ and so on. Whewell, asked once for his autograph, signed himself ‘yours autographically,’ and of such deviations there are abundant examples, mostly with a tendency to the flippant. ‘Yours ever’ Byron declared himself to John Murray; ‘yours ever and evermore,’ wrote Cowper to a friend; while Steele, in a letter to his wife, protested that he was, with his whole heart, hers for ever—which may be pronounced the best of the three.

But there is no reason in the world, to be sure, why we should cling to the ‘yours’ in any shape or modification. There are multitudinous other ways of being valedictory with effect. There is the simple word ‘Adieu.’ ‘And so, my dear madam, adieu,’ writes Pepys to a lady. ‘With all my love, and those sort of pretty things, adieu!’ wrote the future Mrs. Scott to her sweetheart, the Great Magician. And then there is the English equivalent of the word—surely not less available. ‘I wish you were at the devil,’ wrote Sir Philip Francis to Burke, ‘for giving me all this trouble, and so farewell!’ In the old days, as we read in the ‘Paston Letters,’ they had a sufficiently formal fashion of concluding epistles. ‘By your cousin, Dame Elizabeth Brews’—‘By your man, Thomas Kela;’ such are two examples of the custom. ‘Written at Norwich, on St. Thomas’s even, in great haste, by your mother, Agnes Paston’—there is another. ‘From your Russell,’ is the end of a letter from the famous Lady Russell to her husband; and it does not read or sound untenderly. Junius signed himself to Woodfall, ‘your friend.’ Less cold was Mrs. Maclehose to Burns: ‘I may sign, for I am already sealed, your friend, Clarinda.’

The elaborate style of description has always largely obtained, as being obviously suitable for so many occasions. Thus one is not surprised to find the future Charles II. professing to be his father’s ‘most humble and most obedient son and servant,’ or to note how that very complete letter-writer, James Howell, claimed to be the Countess of Sunderland’s ‘most dutiful servant.’ Dr. Johnson did well to announce himself haughtily as Chesterfield’s ‘most humble, most obedient servant;’ while what could Sir Walter Scott be to his Duke of Buccleuch other than ‘your Grace’s truly obliged and grateful’? A similar sense of propriety induced Hood, in a certain memorable epistle, to tell Sir Robert Peel that he had the honour to be, Sir, his most grateful and obedient servant. One cannot object, either, to the ‘Your most obliged and faithful friend’ of Evelyn when addressed to Pepys, or to the ‘Your very faithful, humble servant’ of Bishop Percy, when penned to Boswell. It is, however, a little diverting to observe that Sir Simonds d’Ewes, after addressing his ladylove as ‘Fairest,’ concludes with ‘Your humble servant,’ and that the Tatler of his time, rounding off a dedicatory letter to his ‘Prue,’ says: ‘I am, Madam, your most obliged husband, and most obedient, humble servant, Richard Steele.’Over and over again have letter-writers made their final description of themselves so wholly a part of their last sentence that the former cannot be dissociated from the latter. ‘I have not room to tell you any more,’ wrote Stephen Duck to Joseph Spence in 1751, ‘than that I am, Dear Sir, your most affectionate.’ ‘These,’ said her royal mistress to Mrs. Delany in 1785, ‘are the true sentiments of my dear Mrs. Delany’s very affectionate Queen, Charlotte.’ Hood once finished a charming epistle to a child in this way: ‘Give my love to everybody, from yourself down to Willy, with which and a kiss, I remain, up hill and down dale, your affectionate lover, Thomas Hood.’ Most people remember the pithy correspondence between Foote and his mother: ‘Dear Sam,—I am in prison for debt; come and assist your loving mother, E. Foote.’—‘Dear Mother,—So am I; which prevents his duty being paid to his loving mother by her affectionate son, Sam Foote.’ Not everybody, however, can wind up a letter so neatly as that. A certain commercial house abroad was, perhaps, over-ingenious in its turn of phrase when, writing to an English correspondent, and desiring to be very civil to him, it said: ‘Sugars are falling more and more every day; not so the respect and esteem with which we are,’ etc., etc.