“By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world.”

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TO C.T.G.

Greno House, Grenoside, Sheffield. Aug. 3, 1880.

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A propos of my affairs ... next year we might do something with some of my “small gems.”  Don’t you like “Aldegunda” (Blind Man and Talking Dog)?  D. does so much.  Do you like the “Kyrkegrim turned Preacher,” “Ladders to Heaven,” and “Dandelion Clocks"?...

...  As you know, these little things are the chief favourites with my more educated friends, whose kindness consoles me for the much labour I spend on so few words (The “Kyrkegrim turned Preacher” was “in hand” two years!!!), and I think their only chance would be to be so dressed and presented as to specially and downrightly appeal to those who would value the Art of the Illustrator, and perhaps recognize the refinement of labour with which the letter-press has been ground down, and clipped, and condensed, and selected—­till, as it would appear to the larger buying-public, there is wonderfully little left you for your money!!...

Poor old Cruikshank!  How well—­and willingly—­he would have done “Kyrkegrim turned Preacher.”  He said, when he read my things, “the Fairies came and danced to him”—­which pleased me much.

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Yesterday I pulled myself together and wrote straight to the printers, to the effect that the suffering the erratic and careless printing of “We and the World” cost me was such that I was obliged to protest against X. and Sons economizing by using boys and untrained incapables to print (printing from print being easier, and therefore adapted for teaching the young P.D. how to set up type), pointing out one sentence in which (clear type in A.J.M.) the words “insist on guiding my fate by lines of their own ruling” was printed to the effect that they wouldn’t insist on gilding my faith, etc., their being changed to there.  All of which the reader had overlooked—­to concern himself with my Irish brogue—­and certain reiterations of words which he mortally hates, and which I regard the chastened use of, as like that of the plural of excellence in Hebrew!

(He would have put that demoniacal mark [symbol:  checkmark] against one of the summers in “All the fragrance of summer when summer was gone"!!!)

I sent SUCH a polite message PER X. to his reader, thanking him much for trying to mend my brogue (which had already passed through the hands of three or four Irishmen, including Dr. Todhunter and Dr. Littledale), but proposing that for the future we should confine ourselves to our respective trades,—­That the printer should print from copy, and not out of his own head—­that the reader should read for clerical errors and bad printing, which would leave me some remnant of time and strength to attend to the language and sentiments for which I alone was responsible.  My dear love, I must stop.