MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—At last, my wife being at a concert, and a story being done, I am at some liberty to write and give you of my views. And first, many thanks for the works that came to my sickbed. And second, and more important, as to the _Princess_ [Cazamassima]. Well, I think you are going to do it this time; I cannot, of course, foresee, but these two first numbers seem to me picturesque and sound and full of lineament, and very much a new departure. As for your young lady, she is all there; yes, sir, you can do low life, I believe. The prison was excellent; it was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss from your former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the emphasis of skeleton there is in nature. I pray you to take grime in a good sense; it need not be ignoble: dirt may have dignity; in nature it usually has; and your prison was imposing. And now to the main point, why do we not see you? Do not fail us. Make an alarming sacrifice, and let us see "Henry James's chair" properly occupied. I never sit in it myself (though it was my grandfather's); it has been consecrated to guests by your approval, and now stands at my elbow gaping. We have a new room, too, to introduce to you: our last baby, the drawing-room: it never cries, and has cut its teeth. Likewise, there is a cat now. It promises to be a monster of laziness and self-sufficiency. Pray see, in the November _Time_ (a dread name for a magazine of light reading), a very clever fellow, W. Archer, stating his views of me: the rosy-gilled "athletico-æsthete": and warning me in a fatherly manner that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that my gospel would not do for "those who are shut out from the exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation." To those who know that rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical parts are in particular very bright and neat and often excellently true. Get it by all manner of means. I hear on all sides I am to be attacked as an immoral writer; this is painful. Have I at last got, like you, to the pitch of being attacked? 'Tis the consecration I lack—and could do without. Not that Archer's paper is an attack, or what either he or I, I believe, would call one; 'tis the attacks on my morality (which I had thought a gem of the first water) I referred to.—Yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. * * * * * Oct. 28th, 1885. MY DEAREST FATHER,—Get the November number of _Time_, and you will see a review of me by a very clever fellow, who is quite furious at bottom because I am too orthodox, just as Purcell was savage because I am not orthodox enough. I fall between two stools. It is odd, too, to see how this man thinks me a full-blooded foxhunter, and tells me my philosophy would fail if I lost my health or had to give up exercise!