/# This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston. #/
/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them--never _has_, I think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with them _all_, please--and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (I don't mean _me_, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,