(3) Shelley (1) _The world’s great age_ from Hellas; we are both dead on. After that you have, of course, _The West Wind_ thing. But we think (1) would maybe be enough; no more than two any way. (4) Herrick. _Meddowes_ and _Come_, _my Corinna_. After that _Mr. Wickes_: two any way. (5) Leave out stanza 3rd of Congreve’s thing, like a dear; we can’t stand the ‘sigh’ nor the ‘peruke.’ (6) Milton. _Time_ and the _Solemn Music_. We both agree we would rather go without L’Allegro and Il Penseroso than these; for the reason that these are not so well known to the brutish herd. (7) Is the _Royal George_ an ode, or only an elegy? It’s so good. (8) We leave Campbell to you. (9) If you take anything from Clough, but we don’t either of us fancy you will, let it be _Come back_. (10) Quite right about Dryden. I had a hankering after _Threnodia Augustalis_; but I find it long and with very prosaic holes: though, O! what fine stuff between whiles. (11) Right with Collins. (12) Right about Pope’s Ode. But what can you give? _The Dying Christian_? or one of his inimitable courtesies? These last are fairly odes, by the Horatian model, just as my dear _Meddowes_ is an ode in the name and for the sake of Bandusia. (13) Whatever you do, you’ll give us the Greek Vase. (14) Do you like Jonson’s ‘loathèd stage’? Verses 2, 3, and 4 are so bad, also the last line. But there is a fine movement and feeling in the rest. We will have the Duke of Wellington by God. Pro Symonds and Stevenson. R. L. S. TO CHARLES WARREN STODDARD _Hotel Belvedere_, _Davos Platz_, _Switzerland_ [_December_ 1880]. DEAR CHARLES WARREN STODDARD,—Many thanks to you for the letter and the photograph. Will you think it mean if I ask you to wait till there appears a promised cheap edition? Possibly the canny Scot does feel pleasure in the superior cheapness; but the true reason is this, that I think to put a few words, by way of notes, to each book in its new form, because that will be the Standard Edition, without which no g.’s l. {191} will be complete. The edition, briefly, _sine qua non_. Before that, I shall hope to send you my essays, which are in the printer’s hands. I look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one’s self, is not a very capital affair; and the sham beatitude, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth little,’ one of the truest, and in a sense, the most Christlike things in literature.