The _Burns_ herein mentioned is an article undertaken in the early summer of the same year for the Encyclopædia Britannica. In the end Stevenson's work was thought to convey a view of the poet too frankly critical, and too little in accordance with the accepted Scotch tradition; and the publishers, duly paying him for his labours, transferred the task to Professor Shairp. The volume here announced on the three Scottish eighteenth-century poets unfortunately never came into being. The _Charles of Orleans_ essay appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for December of the following year; that on Villon (with the story on the same theme, _A Lodging for the Night_) not until the autumn of 1877. The essay on Béranger referred to at the end of the letter was one commissioned and used by the editor of the Encyclopædia; _Spring_ was a prose poem, of which the manuscript, sent to me at Cambridge, was unluckily lost in the confusion of a change of rooms. [_Edinburgh, Autumn 1875._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--Thanks for your letter and news. No--my _Burns_ is not done yet, it has led me so far afield that I cannot finish it; every time I think I see my way to an end, some new game (or perhaps wild goose) starts up, and away I go. And then, again, to be plain, I shirk the work of the critical part, shirk it as a man shirks a long jump. It is awful to have to express and differentiate _Burns_ in a column or two. O golly, I say, you know, it _can't_ be done at the money. All the more as I'm going to write a book about it. _Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns: an Essay_ (or _a critical essay?_ but then I'm going to give lives of the three gentlemen, only the gist of the book is the criticism) by Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate. How's that for cut and dry? And I _could_ write this book. Unless I deceive myself, I could even write it pretty adequately. I feel as if I was really in it, and knew the game thoroughly. You see what comes of trying to write an essay on Burns in ten columns.