the Academy and Vanity Fair, and in 1877 more abundantly to London, a
weekly review founded by Mr. Glasgow Brown, an acquaintance of Edinburgh
Speculative days, and carried on, after the failure of that gentleman's
health, by Mr. Henley. But he had no great gift or liking for
journalism, or for any work not calling for the best literary form and
finish he could give. Where he found special scope for such work was in
the Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Leslie Stephen. Here
he continued his critical papers on men and books, already begun in 1874
with _Victor Hugo_, and began in 1876 the series of papers afterwards
collected in _Virginibus Puerisque_. They were continued in 1877, and in
greater number throughout 1878. His first published stories appeared as
follows:--_A Lodging for the Night_, Temple Bar, October 1877; _The Sire
de Maletroit's Door_, Temple Bar, January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_,
Cornhill Magazine, January 1878. In May 1878 followed his first travel
book, _The Inland Voyage_, containing the account of his canoe trip from
Antwerp to Grez. This was to Stevenson a year of great and various
productiveness. Besides six or eight characteristic essays of the
_Virginibus Puerisque_ series, there appeared in London the set of
fantastic modern tales called the _New Arabian Nights_, conceived and
written in an entirely different key from any of his previous work, as
well as the kindly, sentimental comedy of French artist life,
_Providence and the Guitar_; and in the Portfolio the _Picturesque Notes
on Edinburgh_, republished at the end of the year in book form. During
the autumn and winter of this year he wrote _Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes_, and was much and eagerly engaged in the planning of plays
in collaboration with Mr. Henley; of which one, _Deacon Brodie_, was
finished in the spring of 1879. In the same spring he drafted in
Edinburgh, but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics, a study of
which he once spoke as being always his "veiled mistress," under the
name of _Lay Morals_.

But abounding in good work as this period was, and momentous as it was
in regard to Stevenson's future life, it is a period which figures but
meagrely in his correspondence, and in this book must fill
disproportionately little space. Without the least breach of friendship,
or even of intimate confidence on occasion, Stevenson had begun, as was
natural and necessary, to wean himself from his entire depende