den. I had a hankering after _Threnodia
Augustalis_; but I find it long and with very prosaic holes: though, O!
what fine stuff between whiles.

(11) Right with Collins.

(12) Right about Pope's Ode. But what can you give? _The Dying
Christian?_ or one of his inimitable courtesies? These last are fairly
odes, by the Horatian model, just as my dear _Meddowes_ is an ode in the
name and for the sake of Bandusia.

(13) Whatever you do, you'll give us the Greek Vase.

(14) Do you like Jonson's "loathed stage"? Verses 2, 3, and 4 are so
bad, also the last line. But there is a fine movement and feeling in the
rest.

We will have the Duke of Wellington by God. Pro Symonds and Stevenson.

R. L. S.

TO CHARLES WARREN STODDARD

The prospect here alluded to of a cheap edition of the little
travel-books did not get realised. The volume of essays in the
printer's hands was _Virginibus Puerisque_. I do not know what were
the pages in broad Scots copied by way of enclosure.

_Hotel Belvedere, Davos, [December 1880]._

DEAR CHARLES WARREN STODDARD,--Many thanks to you for the letter and the
photograph. Will you think it mean if I ask you to wait till there
appears a promised cheap edition? Possibly the canny Scot does feel
pleasure in the superior cheapness; but the true reason is this, that I
think to put a few words, by way of notes, to each book in its new form,
because that will be the Standard Edition, without which no g.'s l.[34]
will be complete. The edition, briefly, _sine qua non_. Before that, I
shall hope to send you my essays, which are in the printer's hands. I
look to get yours soon. I am sorry to hear that the Custom House has
proved fallible, like all other human houses and customs. Life consists
of that sort of business, and I fear that there is a class of man, of
which you offer no inapt type, doomed to a kind of mild, general
disappointment through life. I do not believe that a man is the more
unhappy for that. Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very
capital affair; and the sham beatitude, "Blessed is he that expecteth
little," one of the truest, and in a sense, the most Christlike things
in literature.

Alongside of you, I have been all my days a red cannon ball of
dissipated effort; here I am by the heels in this Alpine valley, with
just so much of a prospect of future restoration as shall make my
present caged estate easily tolerable to me--shall or should,