P.S.—I congratulate you on living in the corner of all London that I like best [Queen's Square, Bloomsbury]. _Apropos_, you are very right about my voluntary aversion from the painful sides of life. My childhood was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other 'land of counterpane.' But to what end should we renew these sorrows. The sufferings of life may be handled by the very greatest in their hours of insight; it is of its pleasures that our common poems should be formed; these are the experiences that we should seek to recall or to provoke; and I say with Thoreau, "What right have I to complain, who have not ceased to wonder?" and, to add a rider of my own, who have no remedy to offer? R. L. S. * * * * * SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH, October 28th, 1885. DEAR MR. ARCHER,—I have read your paper with my customary admiration; it is very witty, very adroit, it contains a great deal that is excellently true (particularly the parts about my stories and the description of me as an artist in life): but you will not be surprised if I do not think it altogether just. It seems to me, in particular, that you have wilfully read all my works in terms of my earliest; my aim, even in style, has quite changed in the last six or seven years; and this I should have thought you would have noticed. Again, you first remark upon the affectation of the italic names: a practice only followed in my two affected little books of travel, where a typographical _minauderie_ of the sort appeared to me in character; and what you say of it, then, is quite just. But why should you forget yourself and use these same italics as an index to my theology some pages further on? This is lightness of touch indeed; may I say, it is almost sharpness of practice?