In studying a collection of some eight hundred of his letters and notes,[89] originals and copies in print or manuscript, the most striking fact is the insignificance of by far the greater number--that so few bear marks of any care in their preparation, or contain matter of any intrinsic value. In fact, perhaps the greater part of the short notes to Zmeskall and others owe their origin to Beethoven’s dislike of entrusting oral messages to his servants. For the most part it is in vain to seek in his correspondence anything bearing upon the theory or art of music; very seldom is any opinion expressed upon the productions of any contemporary composer; no vivid sketches of men and manners flow from his pen, like those which render the letters of Mozart and Mendelssohn so charming. The proportion of their correspondence which possesses more than a merely biographical value was large; of Beethoven’s very small. His letters, of course, exhibit the usual imperfections of a hasty and confidential correspondence; sometimes, indeed, of an aggravated character. Some of them contain loose statements of fact, such as all men are liable to make through haste or imperfect knowledge; others contain passages of which the only conceivable explanation is Schindler’s statement that Beethoven sometimes amused himself with the harmless mystification of others; but, taken together, the more important letters--while they usually evince his difficulty in finding the best expressions of his thoughts and his constant struggle with the rules of his mother tongue--place his truth and candor in a very favorable light and sometimes rise into a rude eloquence. The reader feels that when the writer is unjust he is under the influence of a mistake or passion--and, as a rule, it is not too late to detect such injustice; that his errors of fact are simply mistakes, honestly made and easily corrected; that if, in the mass, a few paragraphs occur which can be neither fully justified nor excused, it is not to be forgotten that they were not intended for our eyes and that they were written under the constant pressure of a great calamity, which made him doubly sensitive and irritable; and so it will be easy, like Sterne’s Recording Angel, to blot such passages with a tear.