The letters of Lord Byron, of which about 3,000 are known, range in date from 1798, when Byron was 10 years old, to 9 April 1824, a few days before he died. They have long received extraordinary critical praise for their wit, spontaneity and sincerity. Many rate Byron as the greatest letter-writer in English literature, and consider his letters comparable or superior to his poems as literary achievements. They have also been called "one of the three great informal autobiographies in English", alongside the diaries of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell. Their literary value is reflected in the huge prices collectors will pay for them; in 2009 a sequence of 15 letters to his friend Francis Hodgson was sold at auction for almost £280,000. Analysis Although in his letters Byron adapted his style and stance to his different correspondents, they all share an unstudied, unliterary appearance, an "offhand eloquence", which at its best resembles the talk of a conversationalist of genius. He never wrote to produce an effect. Lord Macaulay, in one of his essays, wrote that Byron's letters "are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole, [and] have more matter in them than those of Cowper"; if literary art was employed it was "that highest art which cannot be distinguished from nature". All are deeply imbued with his volatile and indefinable personality, which, for those who find his personality offensive, can be something of a disadvantage. They are marked by rapid alternations of mood, by common sense, wit, intellect and sincerity, and by a cool and unshakeable scepticism. They fascinate the reader through the huge zest for life they manifest. They share with his poems the characteristics of vigour and movement. "Everything is said without reserve, without attenuation, savagely", wrote André Maurois; they "[sweep] the reader along in an irresistible onrush". They repeat words as if they were rhymes, and have rhythms that resemble those of the poems apart from being more varied. They share the outlook on life of Byron's more realistic poems, like Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, rather than the darkly romantic Childe Harold, Manfred and The Corsair. The number of letters Although Byron's life was cut short at the age of only 36, almost 3000 letters of his are known. There are three main reasons why that number is so large: one is simply the pleasure Byron took in composing them;