troduction of 1899, but with more correction and abridgment)--to some,
perhaps, the very lack of art as a correspondent to which Stevenson, as
above quoted, pleads guilty may give the reading an added charm and
flavour. What he could do as an artist in letters we know. I remember
Sir John Millais, a shrewd and very independent judge of books, calling
across to me at a dinner-table, "You know Stevenson, don't you?" and
then going on, "Well, I wish you would tell him from me, if he cares to
know, that to my mind he is the very first of living artists. I don't
mean writers merely, but painters and all of us. Nobody living can see
with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his
tools." But in his letters, excepting a few written in youth and having
more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which
were intended for the public eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is
scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order or logical
sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping
it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human
beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and
Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French,
and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression
or affection, the mood or freak of the moment; pouring himself out in
all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay,
notes of observation and criticism, snatches of remembrance and
autobiography, moralisings on matters uppermost for the hour in his
mind, comments on his own work or other people's, or mere idle fun and
foolery.

By this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson's letters at their best
come nearer than anything else to the full-blooded charm and variety of
his conversation. Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only
that his genial spirit rose to his very best. Few men probably have had
in them such a richness and variety of human nature; and few can ever
have been better gifted than he was to express the play of being that
was in him by means of the apt, expressive word and the animated look
and gesture. _Divers et ondoyant_, in the words of Montaigne, beyond
other men, he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of
singularly assorted characters. Though prose was his chosen medium of
expression, he was by temperament a born poet, to whom the world