MY DEAR PEOPLE,--The dreadful tragedy of the Pall Mall has come to a happy but ludicrous ending: I am to keep the money, the tale writ for them is to be buried certain fathoms deep, and they are to flash out before the world with our old friend of Kinnaird, _The Body Snatcher_. When you come, please to bring-- (1) My Montaigne, or, at least, the two last volumes. (2) My Milton in the three vols. in green. (3) The Shakespeare that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift. (4) Hazlitt's _Table Talk and Plain Speaker_. If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be _solid_. _Croker Papers_, _Correspondence of Napoleon_, _History of Henry IV._, Lang's _Folk Lore_, would be my desires. I had a charming letter from Henry James about my Longman paper. I did not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my poor belly and a swimming in the head. About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have great luck, I shall have to fall upon you at the New Year like a hundredweight of bricks. Doctor, rent, chemist, are all threatening; sickness has bitterly delayed my work; and unless, as I say, I have the mischief's luck, I shall completely break down. _Verbum sapientibus._ I do not live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall; but if only I had a halfpenny worth of health, I could now easily suffice. The last breakdown of my head is what makes this bankruptcy probable. Fanny is still out of sorts; Bogue better; self fair, but a stranger to the blessings of sleep.--Ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884]._