Letter from Amelia B. Edwards, Bristol, to Mr. Appleton, 1878 June 16 : autograph manuscript signed.

Thanking him for a letter and remarking that it has revived her longing for "The East"; noting that she knows of the "Levant cruise", which she would like to do by Yacht, touching "at all those wonderful, beautiful, barren little islands", where one may expect to find antiquities, and mentioning the amphitheater of Cnidus; commenting on a recent book on the subject of Egypt, which she found very good but disappointing, the author's descriptions being out of date owing to the fact that he has not been back to the locales described for ten years; recommending to Appleton, if he wishes to continue with his "Egyptian reading", Gaston Maspero's Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient; commenting on the difficulty of reading cuneiform ("Hieroglyphs are delightful, & not hard at all - though the Egyptian grammar is hard because so imperfect. But cuneiform is a short cut to insanity."); praising Paul Pierret's Dictionnaire d'archéologie égyptienne and Maspero's Du genre épistolaire, and stating that she doesn't wonder that Appleton feels disposed "to lose the world for Egyptology", adding that she has been tempted to give up all other pursuits for it, but cannot afford to do so, adding that she is now "reluctantly fulfilling an engagement ... to write a novel." although her "heart is with the mummies."; expressing her unhappiness at hearing that there is now a hotel at Luxor ("We shall now have Brown, Jones, & Robinson looking for the Kings of the 18th Dynasty ... I hate progress and modern improvements; & I look upon Thomas Cook & Son as the representations of the Evil Principle"); informing him that her book, A thousand miles up the Nile, has been published in the Tauchnitz series, with all her corrections, and asking him if he would like a copy; asking him if he bought anything during his travels on the Nile, noting that she buys small figures of gods and emblems whenever she can and has a mind to write a "handbook of the gods" for students and travelers; promising to let him when she is in town again and that she will edit out as much as possible from the proof of the Calendar review when she receives it.