Most of the letters in this series cover the years 1813-1824, the correspondence after this date being very spasmodic. The letters contain gossip concerning Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Murray's mutual literary friends and former fellow students in Edinburgh, comments on their own literary works, an account of Carlyle's reading, and his reactions to a life of pedagogy, and speculations, 1819, as to his future. A fragmentary letter of 1824 describes literary figures such as Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, whom Carlyle had encountered in London (folio 97). The later letters chiefly concern the borrowing of books.