Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial

ost striking or sensational results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve-a secret fund of power an

of race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead. Stevenson, in a few of his writings-in one of the Merry Men chapters and in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and, to some extent, in The Master of Ballantrae-showed that

once of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have-always with a vein of the finest autobiography-a kind of select and indirect self-revelation-often with a touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allo

woman fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never c

alfour, it is still fine and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too. He makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said. One could almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels-the one would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour, humour and fine obser

well said on this

s childhood, as he himself said apropos of the Child's Garden, he could 'speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not only did he live with death at his elbow in an a

. It was not to be. They buried him, with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300 feet high-a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on the slopes of the hill. There he has a resting-place not all u

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