Here are the two examples from a typical letter-writing manual from the mid-nineteenth century, which gave general instructions about the importance of correct letter-writing and included model letters. Manuals of this type were quite popular and issued in numerous editions, and parents and school teachers also reinforced the kind of writing advice offered in them.

This first passage from Guide to Good Manners... (Springfield [Mass.?], published by John M. Wood, 1847), p. [iii]) explains the importance of letter writing:
An acquaintance with the common forms of letter writing is of such universal necessity, that no person can transact business with satisfaction or decency, without some knowledge of them. Elegant letter writing is one of those accomplishments, which is not only desirable for men of science, but for every lady and gentleman, whatever may be their situation in society. It is the great auxiliary in all our various duties and relations....The negociation of the heart, the plighting of the affections — the tenderest emotions of the soul — are often introduced by a familiar correspondence....Letters should be easy and natural, and convey to the persons to whom we send them, just what we would say to those persons if we were present with them.

This second passage is a model love letter from the manual, supposed to be a man’s first confession of love to a woman:
Madam, Those only who have suffered them, can tell the unhappy moments of hesitating uncertainty which attend the formation of a resolution to declare the sentiments of affection; I who have felt their greatest and most acute torments, could not, previous to my experience, have formed the remotest idea of their severity. Every one of those qualities in you which claim my admiration, increased my diffidence, by showing the great risk I ran in venturing, perhaps before my affectionate assiduities have made the desired impression on your mind, to make a declaration of the ardent passion I have long since felt for you.

This doesn’t seem like a very effective love letter—the prose is convoluted and it’s difficult to understand what the author is trying to say. It helps to paraphrase and simplify the sentences — translate them into modern prose. If you do that, you can see that the male author is saying that: only people in love can know how hard it is to declare it; he had no idea how hard until he fell in love with her; everything he loves about her made him more shy to tell her; he feared that he would blurt out his feelings and drive her away. What does this "elevated" prose suggest about the place of courtship and the courtship letter in relations between the sexes? In the first passage, the manual advises that "letters should be easy and natural," but also that letter writing is a "universal necessity" and thus not to be taken lightly. How could letter writers manage the tension between being natural and taking the task of letter writing seriously?

Read and roll your cursor over these two letters from Campbell Bryce to his sweetheart Sarah Henry and consider how they do and do not conform to the advice manual’s model, and how Bryce negotiates the tension between using natural language and conveying the seriousness of his purpose.