Lay on, Macduff!
to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson
Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 9, 1884.
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.