al or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt
to analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it
certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said of
Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; the
glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described his
emotions and aspirations. Something of the same disability afflicted
Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only less
than he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise his
villains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived
for an idea.' Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the
great scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of _Treasure
Island_, breathes out its soul in a creed:

'"For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good and
bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and what
not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet.
Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my
views--Amen, so be it."'

John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eye
like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted
crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence
is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetid
marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly
distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered,
unless it were in the study of Huish in _The Ebb Tide_.

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with an
intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created for
man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him
should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other
woman, is a question that cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is that
disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge
of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume
towards the other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the
heroine of _The Black Arrow_ is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the
course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of
describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in _The Master of
Ballantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss
Barbara Gra