Shortly after the letters were deposited at Lund, J. H. Gadd, who from 1848 to 1850 held the post of assistant-librarian to the university, made a copy of the correspondence. This copy he afterwards sold, or gave, to the late Mrs. Evelyn Everett Green, a lady well known for her historical researches, and who was for many years employed in the State Paper Office. Mrs. Everett Green, who was in correspondence with Count Schulenburg-Klosterrode, author of _Die Herzogin von Ahlden_, apparently thought of publishing these letters, for she began the fragment of a preface. But for some reason she desisted from her task, and in 1870 sold Gadd’s manuscript copy to the British Museum. This copy, in French, bears nothing to show where the original letters are preserved. I discovered by accident that they were at Lund, when at Leipsig in 1898. On communicating with the university authorities at Lund I found that none of them had any knowledge of the manuscript copy in the British Museum, and they seemed doubtful of its genuineness. I therefore made a journey to Lund for the purpose of consulting the original manuscripts, and found that the copy in the British Museum was on the whole a faithful one. At Lund, too, I was able to trace the history of the letters and to examine in detail the documents. It would be hard to find a more fitting resting-place for these letters than the university library of Lund. Nestling under the shadow of the great cathedral, surrounded by the elms and limes of the beautiful Lundagård, the old library seems to breathe the very spirit of the past. In the silent rooms, with their mellow tomes and paintings of dead and gone worthies, there reigns a profound peace, in strong contrast to the riotous passion, the fret and the fume, the rapture and despair, which run through these records of an ill-fated love, and make them human documents indeed. As we read, the hopes and the fears, the joys and the struggles of the unlucky lovers rise before us with extraordinary vividness. The writers live and move and breathe again; the air is peopled with their presence; and then—we look up from the page and come back to the old library and the great stillness, and realise something of the littleness of human passions beside the passionless flight of time. Two centuries have gone; the lovers are dead; the hands that penned these burning words, the eyes that wept, the hearts that throbbed as they were written, have crumbled into dust. But their witness is here—here in these old and faded pages, which breathe even now, faint as the scent of dead rose leaves, the perfume of their passion.