lling; but
in practice it is worth from ninepence to threepence: thus two glasses
of beer would cost two bits. The Italian fisherman, an old Garibaldian,
is a splendid fellow.

R. L. S.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

The following is in acknowledgment of Mr. Gosse's volume called _New
Poems_:--

_Monterey, Dec. 8, 1879._

MY DEAR WEG,--I received your book last night as I lay abed with a
pleurisy, the result, I fear, of overwork, gradual decline of appetite,
etc. You know what a wooden-hearted curmudgeon I am about contemporary
verse. I like none of it, except some of my own. (I look back on that
sentence with pleasure; it comes from an honest heart.) Hence you will
be kind enough to take this from me in a kindly spirit; the piece "To my
daughter" is delicious. And yet even here I am going to pick holes. I am
a _beastly_ curmudgeon. It is the last verse. "Newly budded" is off the
venue; and haven't you gone ahead to make a poetry daybreak instead of
sticking to your muttons, and comparing with the mysterious light of
stars the plain, friendly, perspicuous, human day? But this is to be a
beast. The little poem is eminently pleasant, human, and original.

I have read nearly the whole volume, and shall read it nearly all over
again; you have no rivals!

Bancroft's _History of the United States_, even in a centenary edition,
is essentially heavy fare; a little goes a long way; I respect Bancroft,
but I do not love him; he has moments when he feels himself inspired to
open up his improvisations upon universal history and the designs of
God; but I flatter myself I am more nearly acquainted with the latter
than Mr. Bancroft. A man, in the words of my Plymouth Brother, "who
knows the Lord," must needs, from time to time, write less emphatically.
It is a fetter dance to the music of minute guns--not at sea, but in a
region not a thousand miles from the Sahara. Still, I am half-way
through volume three, and shall count myself unworthy of the name of an
Englishman if I do not see the back of volume six. The countryman of
Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Drake, Cook, etc.!

I have been sweated not only out of my pleuritic fever, but out of all
my eating cares, and the better part of my brains (strange
coincidence!), by aconite. I have that peculiar and delicious sense of
being born again in an expurgated edition which belongs to
convalescence. It will not be for long; I hear the breakers roar; I
shall be steering h