es.

(2) My Milton in the three vols. in green.

(3) The Shakespeare that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift.

(4) Hazlitt's _Table Talk and Plain Speaker_.

If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be
_solid_. _Croker Papers_, _Correspondence of Napoleon_, _History of
Henry IV._, Lang's _Folk Lore_, would be my desires.

I had a charming letter from Henry James about my Longman paper. I did
not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I
thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my
poor belly and a swimming in the head.

About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have
great luck, I shall have to fall upon you at the New Year like a
hundredweight of bricks. Doctor, rent, chemist, are all threatening;
sickness has bitterly delayed my work; and unless, as I say, I have the
mischief's luck, I shall completely break down. _Verbum sapientibus._ I
do not live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall; but if only I had a
halfpenny worth of health, I could now easily suffice. The last
breakdown of my head is what makes this bankruptcy probable.

Fanny is still out of sorts; Bogue better; self fair, but a stranger to
the blessings of sleep.--Ever affectionate son,

R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

_Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884]._

DEAR LAD,--I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a
copy, which please keep or return. As for not giving a reduction, what
are we? Are we artists or city men? Why do we sneer at stockbrokers? O
nary; I will not take the L40. I took that as a fair price for my best
work; I was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I steal
with my eyes open. _Sufficit._ This is my lookout. As for the paper
being rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable. It is no more above me
in money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for honesty are
below me. Am I Pepys, that because I can find the countenance of "some
of our ablest merchants," that because--and--pour forth languid twaddle
and get paid for it, I, too, should "cheerfully continue to steal"? I am
not Pepys. I do not live much to God and honour; but I will not wilfully
turn my back on both. I am, like all the rest of us, falling ever lower
from the bright ideas I began with, falling into greed, into idleness,
into middle-aged and slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my
bold blade