ad call _bonny_, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'." I
would not venture to hint that Fanny is "no bonny," but there is no
doubt but that in this presentment she is "pale, penetratin', and
interestin'."

As you are aware, I have been wading deep waters and contending with the
great ones of the earth, not wholly without success. It is, you may be
interested to hear, a dreary and infuriating business. If you can get
the fools to admit one thing, they will always save their face by
denying another. If you can induce them to take a step to the right
hand, they generally indemnify themselves by cutting a caper to the
left. I always held (upon no evidence whatever, from a mere sentiment or
intuition) that politics was the dirtiest, the most foolish, and the
most random of human employments. I always held, but now I know it!
Fortunately, you have nothing to do with anything of the kind, and I may
spare you the horror of further details.

I received from you a book by a man by the name of Anatole France. Why
should I disguise it? I have no use for Anatole. He writes very
prettily, and then afterwards? Baron Marbot was a different pair of
shoes. So likewise is the Baron de Vitrolles, whom I am now perusing
with delight. His escape in 1814 is one of the best pages I remember
anywhere to have read. But Marbot and Vitrolles are dead, and what has
become of the living? It seems as if literature were coming to a stand.
I am sure it is with me; and I am sure everybody will say so when they
have the privilege of reading _The Ebb Tide_. My dear man, the grimness
of that story is not to be depicted in words. There are only four
characters, to be sure, but they are such a troop of swine! And their
behaviour is really so deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a
retrospect I wonder I have been able to endure them myself until the
yarn was finished. Well, there is always one thing; it will serve as a
touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent
ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this; but if, as I
have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man's art,
and only wallow in his rancidness like a hound in offal, then they will
certainly be disappointed in _The Ebb Tide_. Alas! poor little tale, it
is not _even_ rancid.

By way of an antidote or febrifuge, I am going on at a great rate with
my History of the Stevensons, which I hope may prove rather amusing, in
some parts at