(9) If you take anything from Clough, but we don’t either of us fancy you will, let it be Come back.
(10) Quite right about Dryden. 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 ‘loathèd 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
Hotel Belvedere, Davos Platz, Switzerland [December 1880].