d of select and indirect self-revelation--often with a touch of
quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be
allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a
friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies
there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with
a smile, as you ask for _more_. Look how he sets, half slyly, these
words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with Catriona
in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street of Edinburgh:

"There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you
why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted."

Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a
youth--"that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge" (when
he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something with human
nature in it. His style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own
person, is most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks
through others, as in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_, it is still fine
and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with
cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too. He
makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said. One could
almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels--the one
would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour,
humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the
history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits
and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of
progenitors. How characteristic it is of him--a man who for so many
years suffered as an invalid--that he should lay it down that the two
great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in
labour.

One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:

"Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but
their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its
success on high animal spirits. They have written histories, essays,
contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be
regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a
frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable
elast