MS British Library Add.42577 f.348

My dear Mrs Valentine
Many thanks for your Seafights which look very tempting though I have done no more than open them yet. My nephews must grow up to them – one being six years and the other six months old.¹ I think you ought to be able to do what an anxious aunt once begged of me to do – to write a story on Midshipmen’s temptations – to which I answered – you know with what good reason that I should only expose myself to the middie’s derision.

I suppose the comic element catches the school boys. I fancy nothing is so difficult to get as fun of a superior order, since it must be easily comprehensible, but burlesque seems to have become the accepted form of it. Mrs Gatty said when I mourned over the spoiling of the grace and poetry of fairy tales that it saved better things from the same fate. The fact is that no one but Leech could make laughter to order.

But what a sale! It certainly justifies proves the attractiveness of the book and is a great encouragement. I know your feeling about editing for people of name – it is to me like a spider with too big a fly in his web.² One watches and doubts[.]

yours sincerely
C M Yonge