MY DEAR MACKAY,--Thank you very much for your kind letter, and still more for your good opinion. You are not the only one who has regretted my absence from your lectures; but you were to me, then, only a part of a mangle through which I was being slowly and unwillingly dragged--part of a course which I had not chosen--part, in a word, of an organised boredom. I am glad to have your reasons for giving up the chair; they are partly pleasant, and partly honourable to you. And I think one may say that every man who publicly declines a plurality of offices, makes it perceptibly more difficult for the next man to accept them. Every one tells me that I come too late upon the field, every one being pledged, which, seeing it is yet too early for any one to come upon the field, I must regard as a polite evasion. Yet all advise me to stand, as it might serve me against the next vacancy. So stand I shall, unless things are changed. As it is, with my health this summer class is a great attraction; it is perhaps the only hope I may have of a permanent income. I had supposed the needs of the chair might be met by choosing every year some period of history in which questions of Constitutional Law were involved; but this is to look too far forward. I understand (1_st_) that no overt steps can be taken till your resignation is accepted; and (2_nd_) that in the meantime I may, without offence, mention my design to stand. If I am mistaken about these, please correct me as I do not wish to appear where I should not. Again thanking you very heartily for your coals of fire I remain yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry [June 1881]._ MY DEAR S. C.,--Great and glorious news. Your friend, the bold unfearing chap, Aims at a professorial cap, And now besieges, do and dare, The Edinburgh History chair. Three months in summer only it Will bind him to that windy bit; The other nine to arrange abroad, Untrammel'd in the eye of God. Mark in particular one thing: He means to work that cursed thing, and to the golden youth explain Scotland and England, France and Spain.