Letter from Charles Eliot Norton to Edmund Clarence Stedman

Shady Hill, Cambridge 16 October, 1888

Dear Mr. Stedman,-

I would do much at your request, but i must stop short of the impossible! I have never written a page tht I value for style, or that I care to have preserved because I wrote it. I have scarcely opened a North American Review with one of

deal of myself. I have asked Child. And his reply is "Absurd!" I can get nothing better from him. Some of the Introductions to the Ballads in his great work now publishing are masterpieces of the literature of pure scholarship, full of character as of learning.

Believe me, Faithfully Yours

C. E. Norton

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my articles in it since it was first published. I hae no list of what I wrote, and I do not want to look up the forgotten essays. You remember the inscription on the palace - front on the Lung' Arms at Piza "Alla Gionata" It fits my work. But I can give you some help as records what the

public like. I have heard of more of readers of the section about Orvito in my little book on Italy, and of the section on Venince in my "Church - building in the Midlle Ages", than of anything else I have written. I have not a copy of either at hand to refer to. If you can wait till the first of November there will be a paper of mine in the New Princeton into which I have put a good