You must get Litolf's _Gavottes Celebres_: I have made another trover there: a musette of Lully's. The second part of it I have not yet got the hang of; but the first--only a few bars! The gavotte is beautiful and pretty hard, I think, and very much of the period; and at the end of it, this musette enters with the most really thrilling effect of simple beauty. O--it's first-rate. I am quite mad over it. If you find other books containing Lully, Rameau, Martini, please let me know; also you might tell me, you who know Bach, where the easiest is to be found. I write all morning, come down, and never leave the piano till about five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano till I go to bed. This is a fine life.--Yours most sincerely, R. L. S. If you get the musette (Lully's), please tell me if I am right, and it was probably written for strings. Anyway, it is as neat as--as neat as Bach--on the piano; or seems so to my ignorance. I play much of the Rigadoon; but it's strange, it don't come off _quite_ so well with me! [Illustration] There is the first part of the musette copied (from memory, so I hope there's nothing wrong). Is it not angelic? But it ought, of course, to have the gavotte before. The gavotte is in G, and ends on the keynote thus (if I remember):-- [Illustration] staccato, I think. Then you sail into the musette. _N.B._--Where I have put an "A" is that a dominant eleventh, or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity), I have always to babble questions: all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever. The whole piece is marked allegro; but surely could easily be played too fast? The dignity must not be lost; the periwig feeling. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Written after his return from an excursion to Matlock with his father, following on their visit to London. "The verses" means _Underwoods_. The suppressed poem is that headed "To ----," afterwards printed in _Songs of Travel_. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is to announce to you, what I believe should have been done sooner, that we are at Skerryvore. We were both tired, and I was fighting my second cold, so we came straight through by the west. We have a butler! He doesn't buttle, but the point of the thing is the style. When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel. He opens the door, and I am told waits at table. Well, what's the odds; I shall have it on my tomb--"He ran a butler." He may have been this and that, A drunkard or a guttler; He may have been bald and fat-- At least he kept a butler. He may have sprung from ill or well, From Emperor or sutler; He may be burning now in Hell-- On earth he kept a butler.