hing labour and felicity built a
composite style out of the style of every good writer of English.
Even in a single page he sometimes reflected many manners. He is
the embodiment of the literary as distinguished from the originating
intellect. His method is almost perfect, but it is devoid of
personality. He says countless things which are the very echo of Sir
Walter's epistolary manner. He says things like Lamb, and sometimes they
are as good as the original could have made them. He says things like
Defoe, like Montaigne, like Rochefoucauld.

His bouquet is culled in every garden, and set in leaves which have
grown in all forests of literature. He is deft, apt, sprightly,
and always sincerely a man. He is just and brave, and essentially a
gentleman. He has the right imitative romance, and he can so blend Defoe
and Dickens with a something of himself which is almost, but not quite,
creative, that he can present you with a blind old Pugh or a John
Silver. He is a _litterateur_ born--and made. A verbal invention is meat
and drink to him. There are places where you see him actively in pursuit
of one, as when Markheim stops the clock with 'an interjected finger,'
or when John Silver's half-shut, cunning, and cruel eye sparkles 'like
a crumb of glass.' Stevenson has run across the Channel for that crumb,
and it is worth the journey.

Stevenson certainly had that share of genius which belongs to the man
who can take infinite pains. Add to this a beautiful personal character,
and an almost perfect receptivity. Add again the power of sympathetic
realisation in a purely literary sense, and you have the man. Let me
make my last addition clear. It is a common habit of his to think as
his literary favourites would have thought He could think like Lamb. He
could think like Defoe. He could even fuse two minds in this way,
and make, as it were, a composite mind for himself to think with.
His intellect was of a very rare and delicate sort, and whilst he was
essentially a reproducer, he was in no sense an imitator, or even for a
single second a plagiarist. He had an alembic of his own which made old
things new. His best possession was that very real sense of proportion
which was at the root of all his humour. 'Why doesn't God explain these
things to a gentleman like me?' There, a profound habitual reverence
of mind suddenly encounters with a ludicrous perception of his own
momentary self-importance. The two electric opposites meet, and