pulpit. It is a singular thing that I
should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so
striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old
huddle of grey hills from which we come. I have just finished _David
Balfour_; I have another book on the stocks, _The Young Chevalier_,
which is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and to deal with
Prince Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done but begun a
third which is to be all moorland together, and is to have for a
centre-piece a figure that I think you will appreciate--that of the
immortal Braxfield--Braxfield himself is my _grand premier_, or, since
you are so much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy
lead....

Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully
unconscientious. You should never write about anybody until you persuade
yourself at least for the moment that you love him, above all anybody on
whom your plot revolves. It will always make a hole in the book; and, if
he has anything to do with the mechanism, prove a stick in your
machinery. But you know all this better than I do, and it is one of your
most promising traits that you do not take your powers too seriously.
_The Little Minister_ ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and
we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with
which you lied about it. If you had told the truth, I for one could
never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and written the earlier
parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably true to fact, would
have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord in art. If you are going to
make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. Now your
book began to end well. You let yourself fall in love with, and fondle,
and smile at your puppets. Once you had done that, your honour was
committed--at the cost of truth to life you were bound to save them. It
is the blot on _Richard Feverel_, for instance, that it begins to end
well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in that case there is worse
behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot--the
story _had_, in fact, _ended well_ after the great last interview
between Richard and Lucy--and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes
all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the
room into whose open window it comes buzzing. It _might_ have so
happened; it needed not; and unless ne