to Charles Baxter

[Vailima, May 1894.]

MY DEAR CHARLES,—My dear fellow, I wish to assure you of the greatness of the pleasure that this Edinburgh Edition gives me.  I suppose it was your idea to give it that name.  No other would have affected me in the same manner.  Do you remember, how many years ago—I would be afraid to hazard a guess—one night when I communicated to you certain intimations of early death and aspirations after fame?  I was particularly maudlin; and my remorse the next morning on a review of my folly has written the matter very deeply in my mind; from yours it may easily have fled.  If any one at that moment could have shown me the Edinburgh Edition, I suppose I should have died.  It is with gratitude and wonder that I consider ‘the way in which I have been led.’  Could a more preposterous idea have occurred to us in those days when we used to search our pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, or wander down the Lothian Road without any, than that I should be strong and well at the age of forty-three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at home bringing out the Edinburgh Edition?  If it had been possible, I should almost have preferred the Lothian Road Edition, say, with a picture of the old Dutch smuggler on the covers.  I have now something heavy on my mind.  I had always a great sense of kinship with poor Robert Fergusson—so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and, as I always felt, rather by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself.  Now the injustice with which the one Robert is rewarded and the other left out in the cold sits heavy on me, and I wish you could think of some way in which I could do honour to my unfortunate namesake.  Do you think it would look like affectation to dedicate the whole edition to his memory?  I think it would.  The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive the dedication of my life’s work.  At the same time, it is very odd—it really looks like the transmigration of souls—I feel that I must do something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone.  It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what condition the stone is.  If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it, and perhaps add a few words of inscription.

I must tell you, what I just remembered in a flash as I was walking about dictating this letter—there was in the original plan of the Master of Ballantrae a sort of introduction describing my arrival in Edinburgh on a visit to yourself and your placing in my hands the papers of the story.  I actually wrote it, and then condemned the idea—as being a little too like Scott, I suppose.  Now I must really find the MS. and try to finish it for the E. E.  It will give you, what I should so much like you to have, another corner of your own in that lofty monument.

Suppose we do what I have proposed about Fergusson’s monument, I wonder if an inscription like this would look arrogant—

This stone originally erected
by Robert Burns has been
repaired at the
charges of Robert Louis Stevenson,
and is by him re-dedicated to
the memory of Robert Fergusson,
as the gift of one Edinburgh
lad to another.

In spacing this inscription I would detach the names of Fergusson and Burns, but leave mine in the text.

Or would that look like sham modesty, and is it better to bring out the three Roberts?