everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his
hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder,
therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was
never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and
unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal.

He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return
not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was
that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have
a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of
matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and
author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no
friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his
work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of
letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as
that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he
bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose
above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling.

In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too
much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the
school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end,
troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen
into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive
with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and
comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of
our memories with the problems they propound and worry over.

His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of
chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of
imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly
valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their
absence from the novel of the day.

His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a
dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery
of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own.
Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a
delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both
cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of
far more