Must we likewise change religions? Mine is a good article, with a trick of stopping; cathedral bell note; ornamental dial; supported by Venus and the Graces; quite a summer-parlour piety. Of yours, since your last, I fear there is little to be said. There is one article I wish to take away with me: my spirits. They suit me. I don't want yours; I like my own; I have had them a long while in bottle. It is my only reservation.--Yours (as you decide), R. L. MONKHOUSE. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyeres [May 1884]._ DEAR BOY,--_Old Mortality_[9] is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes it. We like her immensely. I keep better, but no great shakes yet; cannot work--cannot: that is flat, not even verses: as for prose, that more active place is shut on me long since. My view of life is essentially the comic; and the romantically comic. _As You Like It_ is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters; _Tempest_ and _Twelfth Night_ follow. These are what I mean by poetry and nature. I make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Moliere, except upon the stage, where his inimitable _jeux de scene_ beggar belief; but you will observe they are stage-plays--things _ad hoc_; not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy; hence more perfect, and not so great. Then I come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to Fantasio; to one part of La Derniere Aldini (which, by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion, Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany. And to me these things are the good; beauty, touched with sex and laughter; beauty with God's earth for the background. Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it does, it does so by the heroic illusion; the anti-masque has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our steps in life, and sits by the deathbed, and certainly redacts the epitaph, laughter has been lost from these great-hearted lies. But the comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation; embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character; and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth. R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE Early in May Stevenson again fell very dangerously ill with hemorrhage of the lungs, and lay for several weeks between life and death, until towards the end of June he was brought sufficiently round to venture by slow stages on the journey to England, staying for two or three weeks at Royat on the way. His correspondent had lately been appointed Clark Reader in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. _[La Solitude, Hyeres] From my bed, May 29, 1884._