et,
consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the
headlines, "Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for
Lighthouses," and contains five illustrations in the text.--_Publishers'
Circular._

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME

_By R. L. S._

The Editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents,
the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It
is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer
awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of
autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that
little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost
and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But
when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be
kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak
and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who
entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the
acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a
singular change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the
nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human
comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the
course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had
upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last
character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to
see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott
Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me;
nor has the influence quite passed away. The dying Lear had a great effect
upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so
profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense so overpowering
in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespea