Sir. W. B. Richmond,
R.A., and is in that gentleman's collection of contemporaries, with the
effigies of Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. William Morris, Mr. Browning, and
others. It is unfinished, owing to an illness which stopped the
sittings, and does not show the subject at his best, physically speaking.
There is also a brilliant, slight sketch, almost a caricature, by Mr.
Sargent. It represents Mr. Stevenson walking about the room in
conversation.

The people I have named, or some of them, knew Mr. Stevenson more
intimately than I can boast of doing. Unlike each other, opposites in a
dozen ways, we always were united by the love of letters, and of
Scotland, our dear country. He was a patriot, yet he spoke his mind
quite freely about Burns, about that apparent want of heart in the poet's
amours, which our countrymen do not care to hear mentioned. Well,
perhaps, for some reasons, it had to be mentioned once, and so no more of
it.

Mr. Stevenson possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of
making other men fall in love with him. I mean that he excited a
passionate admiration and affection, so much so that I verily believe
some men were jealous of other men's place in his liking. I once met a
stranger who, having become acquainted with him, spoke of him with a
touching fondness and pride, his fancy reposing, as it seemed, in a fond
contemplation of so much genius and charm. What was so taking in him?
and how is one to analyse that dazzling surface of pleasantry, that
changeful shining humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness; beneath which beat
the most kind and tolerant of hearts?

People were fond of him, and people were proud of him: his achievements,
as it were, sensibly raised their pleasure in the world, and, to them,
became parts of themselves. They warmed their hands at that centre of
light and heat. It is not every success which has these beneficent
results. We see the successful sneered at, decried, insulted, even when
success is deserved. Very little of all this, hardly aught of all this,
I think, came in Mr. Stevenson's way. After the beginning (when the
praises of his earliest admirers were irritating to dull scribes) he
found the critics fairly kind, I believe, and often enthusiastic. He was
so much his own severest critic that he probably paid little heed to
professional reviewers. In addition to his "Rathillet," and other MSS.
which he destroyed, he once, in the Highlands, long ago, lost a
por