I hope you liked that Daily Telegraph article on the Back Gardener I sent you? It is really fine workmanship in the writing line as well as being amusing. I abuse the Press often enough, but I will say such Essays (for they well deserve the name) are a great credit to the age—in Penny Dailies!!!
"The Nursery Nonsense of the Birds," "A Stratified Chronology of Occupancies," "Waves of Whims," etc., etc., are the work of a man who can use his tools with a master's hand, or at least a skilled worker's!
I am reading another French novel, by Daudet, Jack. So far (as I have got) it is marvellous writing. "Le petit Roi—Dahomey" in the school "des pays chauds" is a Dickenesque character, but quite marvellous—his fate—his "gri-gri"—his final Departure to the land where all things are so "made new" that "the former" do not "come into mind"—having in that supreme hour forgotten alike his sufferings, his tormentors, and his friends—and only babbling in Dahomeian in that last dream in which his spirit returned to its first earthly home before "going home" for Good!—is superb!!! The possible meanness and brutality of civilized man in Paris—the possible grandeur and obvious immortality of the smallest, youngest, "gri-gri" worshipping nigger of Dahomey oh it is wonderful altogether, and I should fancy such a sketch of the incompris poet and the rest of the clique!! "C'est Lui."
Ecclesfield, Sheffield. July 23, 1880.
My Dear Mr. Caldecott,
I am sending you a number of "Jackanapes" in case you have lost your other.
I have made marks against places from some of which I think you could select easy scenes; I mean easy in the sense of being on the lines where your genius has so often worked.