MY DEAR CAMPBELL,--The books came duly to hand. My wife has occupied the translation ever since, nor have I yet been able to dislodge her. As for the primer, I have read it with a very strange result: that I find no fault. If you knew how, dogmatic and pugnacious, I stand warden on the literary art, you would the more appreciate your success and my--well, I will own it--disappointment. For I love to put people right (or wrong) about the arts. But what you say of Tragedy and of Sophocles very amply satisfies me; it is well felt and well said; a little less technically than it is my weakness to desire to see it put, but clear and adequate. You are very right to express your admiration for the resource displayed in Oedipus King; it is a miracle. Would it not have been well to mention Voltaire's interesting onslaught, a thing which gives the best lesson of the difference of neighbour arts?--since all his criticisms, which had been fatal to a narrative, do not amount among them to exhibit one flaw in this masterpiece of drama. For the drama, it is perfect; though such a fable in a romance might make the reader crack his sides, so imperfect, so ethereally slight is the verisimilitude required of these conventional, rigid, and egg-dancing arts. I was sorry to see no more of you; but shall conclude by hoping for better luck next time. My wife begs to be remembered to both of you.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY The "Arabs" mentioned below are the stories comprised in the volume _More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter_, written by Stevenson and his wife in collaboration. _Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884._ DEAR HENLEY,--We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs. I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me _aetat_. 90. I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees. I shall put in ----'s letter. He says so little of his circumstances that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook. Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land. Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants. 'Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please. In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something fresh.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO W. H. LOW