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.
There is, and long has been, a prevalent impression that the penning of postscripts is peculiarly characteristic of the feminine letter-writer. Cynics have even gone so far as to assert that no woman can indite an epistle without the addition of a 'P.S.,' and, in support of this grievous aspersion, have been wont to trot out the venerable 'chestnut' about the lady who accepted from her husband a bet that she would not send him a letter without the inevitable addendum--the result being that, after having composed the epistle and signed her name, she artlessly appended the observation, 'You see I _have_ written you a letter without a postscript,' capping it with 'Who has won the wager, you or I?'
It might be argued, even if it could not be proved, that, putting aside mere business communications, and confining one's self to ordinary social correspondence, men are guilty of as many postscripts as women are. But even if the stereotyped charge against the ladies be really well-founded, what of it? Does it convey any tangible reproach? What harm is there in a 'P.S.,' or a 'P.P.S.'? It may be not only a defensible, but positively a praiseworthy, thing. Often it proceeds from nothing more condemnable than a genuine overflow of feeling--a stream of sentiment which, checked by the signature of the writer, bursts its bonds and reasserts its power in a final sentence or two. What could be more charming, for example, than the instances of this afforded in so many of the heroic Lady Russell's letters to her husband--as in that particularly pleasing one in which, after assuring him that all the household are well, and that as he is 'the most enduring husband in the world,' so she is 'the most grateful wife,' she adds her signature, and then recurs to the subject of her children--'Boy is asleep, girls singing abed'--telling of the proposed kindness of a neighbour towards them.