yourself.

2. Plays, dear boy, are madness for me just now. The best play is
hopeless before six months, and more likely eighteen for outsiders like
you and me. And understand me, I have to get money _soon_, or it has no
further interest for me; I am nearly through my capital; with what pluck
I can muster against great anxieties and in a very shattered state of
health, I am trying to do things that will bring in money soon; and I
could not, if I were not mad, step out of my way to work at what might
perhaps bring me in more but months ahead. Journalism, you know well, is
not my forte; yet if I could only get a roving commission from a paper,
I should leap at it and send them goodish (no more than that) goodish
stuff.

As for my poor literature, dear Henley, you must expect for a time to
find it worse and worse. Perhaps, if God favours me a little at last, it
will pick up again. Now I am fighting with both hands, a hard battle,
and my work, while it will be as good as I can make it, will probably be
worth twopence. If you despised the _Donkey_, dear boy, you should have
told me so at the time, not reserved it for a sudden revelation just now
when I am down in health, wealth, and fortune. But I am glad you have
said so at last. Never, please, delay such confidences any more. If they
come quickly, they are a help; if they come after long silence, they
feel almost like a taunt.

Now, to read all this, any one would think you had written unkindly,
which is not so, as God who made us knows. But I wished to put myself
right ere I went on to state myself. Nothing has come but the volume of
Labiche; the _Burns_ I have now given up; the P.O. authorities plainly
regard it as contraband; make no further efforts in that direction. But,
please, if anything else of mine appears, _see that my people have a
copy_. I hoped and supposed my own copy would go as usual to the old
address, and, let me use Scotch, I was fair affrontit when I found this
had not been done.

You have not told me how you are and I heard you had not been well.
Please remedy this.

The end of life? Yes, Henley, I can tell you what that is. How old are
all truths, and yet how far from commonplace; old, strange, and
inexplicable, like the Sphinx. So I learn day by day the value and high
doctrinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; not more than I am able
to bear, for that makes a man mad, as hunger drives the wolf to sally
from the forest; but still to suff