and tenderness. For the
work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and
temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places
where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a
gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life
and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was
far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could
touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in
his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an
ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty
condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.

Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the
volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who
may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find
his essays on _Villon_, _Victor Hugo's Romances_, _Samuel Pepys_,
_Yoshida Torajiro_ and _Charles of Orleans_ a very pleasant means of
obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.

In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto
& Windus, under the title _Virginibus Puerisque_, Mr Stevenson
discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a
light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little
things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or
misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done
with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom,
and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men
and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.

That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never
far away from the man whose paper on _Ordered South_ is like the bravely
repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on _El
Dorado_ proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep
and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the
disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often
to be its own reward.

Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the
writing of four plays which were privately printed, _Deacon Brodie_ in
1880, _Beau Austin_ in 1884, _Admiral Guinea_ in 1884, and _Robert
Macaire_ in 1885--the whole being finally publishe