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DEPARTMENTAL COMMITTEE ON HOUSE LETTING IN SCOTLAND, 116 HANOVER STREET, EDINBURGH,
7th Jan.y/07.
My dear John,
I am now going to write you on paper strictly improper my humble opinion of your Lodge in the Wilderness the gift of which caused me such intense gratification at the time. My opinion is that the discussions per se could not be improved upon; as a serious suggestion to any one who even tries to think
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I don't think it can be overrated. You have ticked off every conceivable point of view and I think your essay on treatment of the native & emigration absolutely masterly (although I confess to merely see a putting off an evil day till say Canada & N.Z. have a pop: of 1000 to the sq. mile. Still why shouldn't we postpone & leave the problem to be settled at a later time when the experiments of other countries which have not had our overflow tanks have taught
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us something?)
For another thing you have transported me to Africa I feel as if I had been there & it makes me slightly annoyed with the Waddlesworth Manor fittings of the colossal bungalow where you put your puppets - because puppets they all are, because somehow it jars on the scrub, the camping out, the lions & the niggers in the beehive huts.
I admit I prefer Sligachan now to Sligachan once and
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Kinlochewe to Shiel Inn, but are these admittedly ripping things a subject for literature, or good cuisine or cigars. Take even Poe's garden up the Rhine or wherever it was. It is on the whole the least enthralling of his wondrous tales.
But I dont deny that as an individual I am very much interested to get at your idea of a fairy palace (we all have our fairy palaces which accompany us on solitary walks in ugly streets) and as for the inhabitants I forgive them everything because they
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are all J.B. I think, if I may say so, that the danger of working fast & easily & with complete grasp is that a kind of author's dominance broods over all the individualities who are intended to be presenting different views.
Admitting that Society talks in the same tone still the detail of the sentences the types of epigram, or evasion of argumentative difficulty
