I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering—I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they?—honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I believe it.
My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!
Sincerely Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
To Brander Matthews, in New York:
RIVERDALE, May 8, '03 (Mailed June, 1910).
DEAR BRANDER,—I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering—that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being—Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage properties—finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.
I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?
Yrs ever
MARK.