Your remarks on the _Black Arrow_ are to the point. I am pleased you liked Crookback; he is a fellow whose hellish energy has always fired my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written the play after he had learned some of the rudiments of literature and art rather than before. Some day, I will re-tickle the Sable Missile, and shoot it, _moyennant finances_, once more into the air; I can lighten it of much, and devote some more attention to Dick o’ Gloucester. It’s great sport to write tushery. By this I reckon you will have heard of my proposed excursiolorum to the Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, and kindred sites. If the excursiolorum goes on, that is, if _moyennant finances_ comes off, I shall write to beg you to collect introductiolorums for me. Distinguo: 1. _Silverado_ was not written in America, but in Switzerland’s icy mountains. 2. What you read is the bleeding and disembowelled remains of what I wrote. 3. The good stuff is all to come—so I think. ‘The Sea Fogs,’ ‘The Hunter’s Family,’ ‘Toils and Pleasures’—_belles pages_.—Yours ever, RAMNUGGER. O!—Seeley is too clever to live, and the book a gem. But why has he read too much Arnold? Why will he avoid—obviously avoid—fine writing up to which he has led? This is a winking, curled-and-oiled, ultra-cultured, Oxford-don sort of an affectation that infuriates my honest soul. ‘You see’—they say—‘how unbombastic _we_ are; we come right up to eloquence, and, when it’s hanging on the pen, dammy, we scorn it!’ It is literary Deronda-ism. If you don’t want the woman, the image, or the phrase, mortify your vanity and avoid the appearance of wanting them. TO W. H. LOW _La Solitude_, _Hyères_, _October_ [1883]. MY DEAR LOW,—. . . Some day or other, in Cassell’s _Magazine of Art_, you will see a paper which will interest you, and where your name appears. It is called ‘Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Artists,’ and the signature of R. L. Stevenson will be found annexed. Please tell the editor of _Manhattan_ the following secrets for me: 1_st_, That I am a beast; 2_nd_, that I owe him a letter; 3_rd_, that I have lost his, and cannot recall either his name or address; 4_th_, that I am very deep in engagements, which my absurd health makes it hard for me to overtake; but 5_th_, that I will bear him in mind; 6_th_ and last, that I am a brute.