I cannot tell you how it pleases me that you liked the bit about Aldershot in “Laetus.”  I hope that it must have grated very much if I had done it badly or out of taste, on any one who knows it as well as you do; and that its moving your sympathies does mean that I have done it pretty well.  I cannot tell you the pains I expended on it!  All those sentences about the Camp were written in scraps and corrected for sense and euphony, etc., etc., bit by bit, like “Jackanapes"!!!  Did I tell you about “Tuck of Drum”?  Several people who saw the proof, pitched into me, “Never heard of such an expression.”  I was convinced I knew it, and as I said, as a poetical phrase; but I could not charge my memory with the quotation:  and people exasperated me by regarding it as “camp slang.”  I got Miss S. to look in her Shakespeare’s Concordance, but in vain, and she wrote severely, “My Major lifts his eyebrows at the term.”  I was in despair, but I sent the proof back, trusting to my instincts, and sent a postcard to Dr. Littledale, and got a post-card back by return—­“Scott”—­“Rokeby.”

    “With burnished brand and musketoon,
      So gallantly you come,
    I rede you for a bold dragoon,
      That lists the tuck of drum.”—­
    “I list no more the tuck of drum,
      No more the trumpet hear;
    But when the beetle sounds his hum,
      My comrades take the spear.”

And I copied this on to another postcard and added, Tell your Major! and despatched it to Miss S.!  She said, “You did Cockadoodle!”—­

But isn’t it exquisite? What a creature Scott was!  Could words, could a long romance, give one a finer picture of the ex-soldier turned “Gentleman of the Road”?  The touch of regret—­“I list no more the tuck of drum,” and the soldierly necessity for a “call”—­and then such a call!

When the Beetle sounds his hum—­

The Dor Beetle!—­

I hope you will like the tale as a whole.  It has been long in my head.

* * * * *

Oh! how funny Grossmith was!  Yesterday I was at the Matinee for the Dramatic School, and he did a “Humorous Sketch” about Music, when he said with care-carked brows that there was only one man’s music that thoroughly satisfied him (after touching on the various schools!)—­and added—­“my own.”  It was inexpressibly funny.  His “Amateur Composer” would have made you die!

Ah, but THE treat, such a treat as I have not heard for years—­was that old Ristori RECITED the 5th Canto of the Inferno.  I did not remember which it was, and feared I should not be able to follow, but it proved to be “Francesca.”  Never could I have believed it possible that reciting could be like that.  I could have gone into a corner and cried my heart out afterwards, the tension was so extreme.  And oh what power and WHAT refinement!