to Sidney Colvin

17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh [July 28, 1879].

MY DEAR COLVIN,—I am just in the middle of your Rembrandt.  The taste for Bummkopf and his works is agreeably dissembled so far as I have gone; and the reins have never for an instant been thrown upon the neck of that wooden Pegasus; he only perks up a learned snout from a footnote in the cellarage of a paragraph; just, in short, where he ought to be, to inspire confidence in a wicked and adulterous generation.  But, mind you, Bummkopf is not human; he is Dagon the fish god, and down he will come, sprawling on his belly or his behind, with his hands broken from his helpless carcase, and his head rolling off into a corner.  Up will rise on the other side, sane, pleasurable, human knowledge: a thing of beauty and a joy, etc.

I’m three parts through Burns; long, dry, unsympathetic, but sound and, I think, in its dry way, interesting.  Next I shall finish the story, and then perhaps Thoreau.  Meredith has been staying with Morley, who is about, it is believed, to write to me on a literary scheme.  Is it Keats, hope you?  My heart leaps at the thought.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.