2110-4-3-9

ROYAL CORTISSOZ 70 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK

March 3rd, 1923.

John Buchan, Esq., 35 Paternoster Row, E.C.,

London, England.

My dear Sir;

I would like to congratulate you on your book,"Huntingtower." The enclosed editorial, which I wrote for my paper The New York Tribune the other day, will partly explain why I am keen about it - but only partly. The thing is a pure joy. I wrote, as you see, largely to make a specific point, but it I had had more room it would have been good to go into detail about this work. Especially I could enlarge upon the spontaneity ot your inspiration, the way in which the narrative simply walks ott and carries itself through with an energy as true to life as it is to romance. You've no idea of the pleasure you have given to me, and to my wife also, who is of Scotch descent, from the Hutchinsons & and Mackays, and loves every touch in "Huntingtower" that leaves the mark of race.

We both crave some light from you on a phrase that has become a kind of blithe slogan in our household, "Ye'll no fickle Thomas Yownie." We sense the meaning but we want to know the derivation and exact meaning here of that "fickle." No doubt with our Scots sympathies we ought to know but we throw ourselves upon your good nature.

I hope you will allow an old hand to speak with feeling of your writing so steadily and so magnificently on the side of the angels. For some thirty-odd years I have been writing literary as well as art criticism and all along I have been wrathful against the men - and women - who think that dirt means strength. At the moment I have in mind a book much in vogue by May Sinclair, "Anne Fielding and the Severns," a sickly, mawkish thing which the sophomores love to praise. Alter it a book like "Huntingtower" is more than a tonic, it is, I repeat, a pure joy.

You will be interested, I am sure, to know what one man thought of "The Thirty Nine Steps." I took out the parts as they appeared in "Blackwood" and sent them to my clear friend the late Theodore Roosevalt, then in hospital. He told me afterwards that the tale had enormously

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beguiled his convalescence. I believe that you have rendered this service to countless readers of all your books. Life is the sweeter for the gallantr , the honor, the truth that you se beautifully put into them.

By this mail I am sending you a little book of my own, "Nine Holes of Golf," the writing of which gave me a kind of holiday from the serious biographical and critical writing that mostly occupies me. It is in no wise a return for the pleasure you have given me in "Huntingtower." But you are a sportsman and so through these pages, dedicated to sport, i want, if I can, to give you a clasp of the hand, a salute across the sea to a writer I admire and respect. I beg you will accept it in the friendly spirit in which I send it.

Sincerely yours,

Royal Cortissoz