a reaction
against what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for careful
preparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it
was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction. He began with essays,
literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel: and
certain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in this
way. During the years 1878 and 1879, in a short-lived periodical called
_London_, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and
had a very small staff, he issued certain _New Arabian Nights_ which
caught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors very
strongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had
arisen. It did not, however, at first much attract the public: and it
was the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the public
forces their hands. For a time he had to wait, and to take what
opportunity he could get of periodical publication, "boy's
book"-writing, and the like. In fact _Treasure Island_ (1883), with
which he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy's book
by some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainly
deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea;
but the manner of dealing--the style and narrative and the delineation
of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver--is about as
little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time
Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless
disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any
great bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he
took to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirers
could have willingly spared. But his last completed book, _Catriona_
(1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the
best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important
respect--that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an
inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his
books had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that the
unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ (1897), which he left a fragment at his
death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in
particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more
spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly
laboured style in which he had h