2110-5-9-36

[G. Wilkinson - (shd be CH Wilkinson)]

Worcester College Oxford

Nov. 20, 1931

My dear Buchan

My delay in writing to thank you for the very handsome American edition of The Blanket of the Dark - a first rate title - has been due not to any lack of gratitude but to a desire to read it first. Where I painfully collected a few dry bones of pedantic information you have breathed into these bones, clad with flesh, the breath of life. I might make one or two minute and totally unimportant criticisms of your Tudor vagabonds. Why, for instance John Naps, when Lawrence Crosbiter or Cocke Lorell was available? and were there really any "coney-catchers" in the 1530`s, and if there were did they ever go outside London? Is not Greene the first and only authority

concerning them?

I forgot to quote the great 'Tom o' Bedlam' song from Wit and Drollery, 1682 (not 1661, as Disraeli says) "With a heart of furious fancies, whereof I am commander", but I feel Pierce ought to have sung it!

I thoroughly enjoyed your book. You have made a certain aspect of the return to what Johnson in Midwinter calls 'the daedal earth', your own. It is a great pleasure to 'go to nurse with Gaea' in your company and under your guidance. My best thanks.

You are interested in all that concerns Montrose. I find that the two first stanzas of what forms the Second Part of 'A Proper New Ballad', i.e. the imitation of 'My dear and only love; were printed in Wit and Drollery, 1656. It would seem certain that the original poem must have been printed before this. I wish we could find it.

Yours ever, CH Wilkinson