some means or other gets admittance into a rich man's
mansion, and there dies--assuming state, and striking awe into the
breasts of those who had looked down upon him.'

These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to
a romance--of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind's
eye. Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others are of value
chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a
story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be
painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to
the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks
for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger,
mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance--to the
superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural against
science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality.

Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory.
Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on
board the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers of
Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that
abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the
dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them
subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in
them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and
secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of
the parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blind
pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of
inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in
_Kidnapped_, and of the disguise of a blind leper in _The Black Arrow_,
are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The
last appearance of Pew, in the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written in
collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all
the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when he
puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room
where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every
movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.'

The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never to
be found in th