so
much fame won by writings which might be called scrappy and desultory by
the _advocatus diaboli_? It is a most miscellaneous literary baggage
that Mr. Stevenson carries. First, a few magazine articles; then two
little books of sentimental journeyings, which convince the reader that
Mr. Stevenson is as good company to himself as his books are to others.
Then came a volume or two of essays, literary and social, on books and
life. By this time there could be no doubt that Mr. Stevenson had a
style of his own, modelled to some extent on the essayists of the last
century, but with touches of Thackeray; with original breaks and turns,
with a delicate freakishness, in short, and a determined love of saying
things as the newspapers do not say them. All this work undoubtedly
smelt a trifle of the lamp, and was therefore dear to some, and an
offence to others. For my part, I had delighted in the essays, from the
first that appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_, shortly after the Franco-
German war. In this little study, "Ordered South," Mr. Stevenson was
employing himself in extracting all the melancholy pleasure which the
Riviera can give to a wearied body and a mind resisting the clouds of
early malady,

"Alas, the worn and broken board,
How can it bear the painter's dye!
The harp of strained and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's skill reply!
To aching eyes each landscape lowers,
To feverish pulse each gale blows chill,
And Araby's or Eden's bowers
Were barren as this moorland hill,"--

wrote Scott, in an hour of malady and depression. But this was not the
spirit of "Ordered South": the younger soul rose against the tyranny of
the body; and that familiar glamour which, in illness, robs Tintoretto of
his glow, did not spoil the midland sea to Mr. Stevenson. His gallant
and cheery stoicism were already with him; and so perfect, if a trifle
overstudied, was his style, that one already foresaw a new and charming
essayist.

But none of those early works, nor the delightful book on Edinburgh,
prophesied of the story teller. Mr. Stevenson's first published tales,
the "New Arabian Nights," originally appeared in a quaintly edited weekly
paper, which nobody read, or nobody but the writers in its columns. They
welcomed the strange romances with rejoicings: but perhaps there was only
one of them who foresaw that Mr. Stevenson's _forte_ was to be fiction,
not essay writing; that he wa