AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS): "one regrets one's youth more sharply in England than in France"

n.p., n.d. . Framed Letter. A bit of staining in the margins. Near Fine, framed between two pieces of glass with a 1917 auction description for this letter glued to one side over blank space. An important two-page letter in Stevenson's hand and SIGNED twice by him with his initials "R.L.S." on two sides of a 9" x 8" sheet of paper so that each page of writing has a blank verso. Interesting and characteristic content addressed to his cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, about his health and contrasting England and France. In part: "I have not got the cold. Fanny is better.... I am so dry-rotten that I can do nothing. I have been as dry-rotten in the Savile Club (the old building) where it was endemic, like hospital gangrene; but never anywhere else. It is blame cold. As soon as you have got the pontoon started, better let me see. Do not be stumped by difficulty of beginning; remember that is always hard.... Dry rot is, I think, English; though I have felt its hand in Parry on the gay bullyvard. The cure is a voyage.... It is odd: one regrets one's youth more sharply in England than in France. The Climate calls more for exercise, activity, the tightened nerve, change of scene, a little hardship, and much open air. In France I was quite willing to become ventripotent, sluggish and quadragenarian; here I want to leap, and run, and --- can't."

Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob") was perhaps the most important person in RLS's life when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh studying engineering. Bob forsake the family profession to study art, and he must have played some part in RLS abandoning both engineering and Christianity to become a writer and a Bohemian. The two were members of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club whose constitution stated: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us." Among their friends at the time was the painter John Singer Sargent.