faced, drunken, vicious boy
that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is
more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task
was set about. I may tell you (because your poet is not dead) something
of how I feel: we are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this
last century. Well, the one is the world's; he did it, he came off, he
is for ever; but I and the other--ah! what bonds we have--born in the
same city; both sickly, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the
madhouse, with a damnatory creed; both seeing the stars and the dawn,
and wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient stones, under the same
pends, down the same closes, where our common ancestors clashed in their
armour, rusty or bright. And the old Robin, who was before Burns and the
flood, died in his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the
great things that were to come; and the new, who came after, outlived
his green-sickness, and has faintly tried to parody the finished work.
If you will collect the strays of Robin Fergusson, fish for material,
collect any last re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you
prefer--to write the preface--to write the whole if you prefer:
anything, so that another monument (after Burns's) be set up to my
unhappy predecessor on the causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know,
nor will any man, how deep this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives
in me. I do, but tell it not in Gath; every man has these fanciful
superstitions, coming, going, but yet enduring; only most men are so
wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies for
themselves.--I am, yours very truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

_Vailima, April 1891._

MY DEAR GOSSE,--I have to thank you and Mrs. Gosse for many mementoes,
chiefly for your _Life_ of your father. There is a very delicate task,
very delicately done. I noted one or two carelessnesses, which I meant
to point out to you for another edition; but I find I lack the time, and
you will remark them for yourself against a new edition. There were two,
or perhaps three, flabbinesses of style which (in your work) amazed me.
Am I right in thinking you were a shade bored over the last chapters? or
was it my own fault that made me think them susceptible of a more
athletic compression? (The flabbinesses were not there, I think, but in
the more admirable part, where they showed the bigger.) Take i