erton in _The Wrecker_; and a
wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in _Kidnapped_,
_Catriona_, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense
trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of
them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that
remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose.

But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description
of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His
mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in
sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And
here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose.
Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and
a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of
them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for
his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers
of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of
English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in
one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.' And
he quotes a passage from Harrington's _Oceana_:

'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man,
but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own
hand, is herself King People.'

It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned
something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly
mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who
compiled the ever-memorable _Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen_. Mr.
George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose
influence may be detected in his style.

However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion
borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of
stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the
slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words,
show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even
to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact
will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them
nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp. This
was what Stevenson did, and the very conve