Written just before a visit to London; not, this time, as my guest at the British Museum, but to stay with his father at an hotel in Fitzroy Square.
[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]
MY DEAR COLVIN,—I have been reading the Vth and VIth Aeneid—the latter for the first time—and am overpowered. That is one of the most astonishing pieces of literature, or rather it contains the best, I ever met with. We are all damned small fry, and Virgil is one of the tops of human achievement; I never appreciated this; you should have a certain age to feel this; it is no book for boys, who grind under the lack of enterprise and dash, and pass ignorantly over miracles of performance that leave an old hoary-headed practitioner like me stricken down with admiration. Even as a boy, the Sibyl would have bust me; but I never read the VIth till I began it two days ago; it is all fresh and wonderful; do you envy me? If only I knew any Latin! if you had a decent edition with notes—many notes—I should like well to have it; mine is a damned Didot with not the ghost of a note, type that puts my eyes out, and (I suspect) no very splendid text—but there, the carnal feelings of the man who can’t construe are probably parents to the suspicion.
My dear fellow, I would tenfold rather come to the Monument; but my father is an old man, and if I go to town, it shall be (this time) for his pleasure. He has many marks of age, some of childhood; I wish this knighthood business could come off, though even the talk of it has been already something, but the change (to my eyes) is thoroughly begun; and a very beautiful, simple, honourable, high-spirited and child-like (and childish) man is now in process of deserting us piecemeal. Si quis piorum—God knows, not that he was pious, but he did his hand’s darg or tried to do it; and if not,—well, it is a melancholy business.—Yours ever,
R. L. S.
To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin
The first letter showing Stevenson’s new interest in the technicalities of music.
[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—I try to tell myself it is good nature, but I know it is vanity that makes me write.
I have drafted the first part of Chapter VI., Fleeming and his friends, his influence on me, his views on religion and literature, his part at the Savile; it should boil down to about ten pages, and I really do think it admirably good. It has so much evoked Fleeming for myself that I found my conscience stirred just as it used to be after a serious talk with him: surely that means it is good? I had to write and tell you, being alone.