, and the procedure of the Court of
Session are still a sufficiently picturesque survival of an older time;
and to a mind like Mr Stevenson's that short association with the
historic Parliament House, with its far-reaching traditions and with the
acting majesty of the law in Scotland that is so old and so unchanged an
institution, which to-day employs the very words and phrases of bygone
centuries, and still holds, in many points, to the structure of the
ancient Roman Law, could not fail to be interesting and useful. Like Sir
Walter Scott, when he too walked in the Advocates' Hall, he no doubt
found much that was worth studying in the old law procedure as well as
in the men and manners of his own day, and appreciated to the full the
magnificent library in its dark and silent rooms that are such a
contrast to the bustle of the courts, and every corner of which is
teeming with history.

But his heart was not in the Law Courts, and already in that book-lined
study at 17 Heriot Row, the window of which looked over the Forth to
Fife, and the walls of which were so temptingly covered with books, his
real life work had begun. No treat was greater, no honour more esteemed,
than a visit to that study and a learned disquisition there on its
owner's favourite books or methods of work.

Walking up and down with the hands thrown out in gesticulations,
semi-foreign but eminently natural--for did not the child of three do it
while repeating hymns on that walk to Broughton!--Mr Stevenson gave his
opinions on matters grave and gay. Possibly he even produced his
note-books, and with a slim finger between the leaves showed us the
practice which he considered necessary for the creation of an author and
the making of a style, breaking off in the middle of his disquisition to
quote some master of the art or to take from the shelves a favourite
book and read aloud a pertinent illustration of the subject in hand.

Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, Borrow's _Bible in Spain_, the Bible
itself, Butler's _Hudibras_, George Meredith's novels, then less
appreciated than now, were all books for a better knowledge of which
some of us had to thank those visits to the study: on the shelves too
were Bulwer Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, the old dramatists, ballads, and
chapbooks, and innumerable favourites that had a place in his heart as
well as in his bookcase.

Keen and clever were the criticisms he made on them--criticisms that
come back to one with the pa