_Rembrandt_ refers to an article in the Edinburgh Review. "Bummkopf"
was Stevenson's name for the typical pedant, German or other, who
cannot clear his edifice of its scaffolding, nor set forth the
results of research without intruding on the reader all its
processes, evidences, and supports. _Burns_ is the aforesaid Cornhill
essay: not the rejected Encyclopaedia article.
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh [July 28, 1879]._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am just in the middle of your _Rembrandt_. The taste
for Bummkopf and his works is agreeably dissembled so far as I have
gone; and the reins have never for an instant been thrown upon the neck
of that wooden Pegasus; he only perks up a learned snout from a footnote
in the cellarage of a paragraph; just, in short, where he ought to be,
to inspire confidence in a wicked and adulterous generation. But, mind
you, Bummkopf is not human; he is Dagon the fish god, and down he will
come, sprawling on his belly or his behind, with his hands broken from
his helpless carcase, and his head rolling oft into a corner. Up will
rise on the other side, sane, pleasurable, human knowledge: a thing of
beauty and a joy, etc.
I'm three parts through _Burns_; long, dry, unsympathetic, but sound
and, I think, in its dry way, interesting. Next I shall finish the
story, and then perhaps Thoreau. Meredith has been staying with Morley,
has been cracking me up, he writes, to that literary Robespierre; and he
(the L. R.) is about, it is believed, to write to me on a literary
scheme. Is it Keats, hope you? My heart leaps at the thought.--Yours
ever,