Nobody 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.