amusement, like the novels of
Thackeray; but she puts witty and aphoristic sayings into the
conversations of the characters. The scene at the "Rainbow" inn is
bristling with mother wit. Mr. Macey observes:--

"'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of
himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be
two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear
itself.'"[11]

Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the style of George
Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is too full of abstract and
scientific terms to permit of great flexibility and idiomatic purity
of English. She is master of powerful figures of speech, original,
epigrammatic turns of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring
eloquence.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _From a photograph_.]

Life.--By preferring romantic incident to the portrayal of
character, Stevenson differed from his great Victorian predecessors in
the field of fiction. He was born in 1850 in the romantic city of
Edinburgh, which he has described so well in his _Picturesque Notes on
Edinburgh_. Being an invalid from early childhood, he was not sent
regularly to school; yet he was ready at the age of seventeen to enter
Edinburgh University. He says of himself that in college he neglected
all the studies that did not appeal to him, to read with avidity
English poetry and fiction, Scottish legend and history. During his
summer vacations he worked at lighthouse engineering. The out-of-door
life was just what he liked; but the office work was irksome to him.
When finally he made his dislike known, his father, although bitterly
disappointed at his son's aversion to the calling followed by two
generations of Stevensons, nevertheless consented to a change; and
they compromised on the law. In 1875 Stevenson succeeded in gaining
admission to the bar; but he soon realized that he would never feel at
home in this profession. Moreover, he had always wanted to be a
writer. He says:--

"All through my boyhood and youth...
I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write. I kept always
two books in my pocket, one to read, one
to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy
fitting what I saw with appropriate words.
...Thus I lived with words. And what I
thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was
written consciously for practice."

[Illustration: STEVENSON AS