or identifying, his pleasure
with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been
trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made
a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the
invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of
the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the faint
reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic
adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier
tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as
his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob
will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.

For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on
Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his
inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an
occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his
unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of
his character it revealed--though it revealed also his weakness as
critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance
where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at
his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be
his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly
imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously
missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even
into his Monograph on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out
of it.

And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was
like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of
his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of
wine, upon which he had large--Continental--ideas, declaring he would
not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants,
could drink it without stint and also without thought of
expense--though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted
chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a
device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my
ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him
with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an
ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior b