our support to
any successor? I have a great mind to try. The summer session would suit
me; the chair would suit me--if only I would suit it; I certainly should
work it hard: that I can promise. I only wish it were a few years from
now, when I hope to have something more substantial to show for myself.
Up to the present time, all that I have published, even bordering on
history, has been in an occasional form, and I fear this is much against
me.

Please let me hear a word in answer, and believe me, yours very
sincerely,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

TO PROFESSOR AENEAS MACKAY

_Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry [June 1881]._

MY DEAR MACKAY,--Thank you very much for your kind letter, and still
more for your good opinion. You are not the only one who has regretted
my absence from your lectures; but you were to me, then, only a part of
a mangle through which I was being slowly and unwillingly dragged--part
of a course which I had not chosen--part, in a word, of an organised
boredom.

I am glad to have your reasons for giving up the chair; they are partly
pleasant, and partly honourable to you. And I think one may say that
every man who publicly declines a plurality of offices, makes it
perceptibly more difficult for the next man to accept them.

Every one tells me that I come too late upon the field, every one being
pledged, which, seeing it is yet too early for any one to come upon the
field, I must regard as a polite evasion. Yet all advise me to stand, as
it might serve me against the next vacancy. So stand I shall, unless
things are changed. As it is, with my health this summer class is a
great attraction; it is perhaps the only hope I may have of a permanent
income. I had supposed the needs of the chair might be met by choosing
every year some period of history in which questions of Constitutional
Law were involved; but this is to look too far forward.

I understand (1_st_) that no overt steps can be taken till your
resignation is accepted; and (2_nd_) that in the meantime I may, without
offence, mention my design to stand.

If I am mistaken about these, please correct me as I do not wish to
appear where I should not.

Again thanking you very heartily for your coals of fire I remain yours
very sincerely,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

_Kinnaird Cottage, Pitlochry [June 1881]._

MY DEAR S. C.,--Great and glorious news. Your friend, the bold unfearing
chap, Aims