as Ludwig Tieck, such
was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is
something more--he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows,
at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.

The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who
had intimacy with him. Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book):

I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts--namely,
that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so
astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and
emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together,
with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to
me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me--his elder
by some fifteen months--as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be
men.' _He of all mortals_, _who was_, _in a sense_, _always still a
boy_!"

Mr Gosse tells us:

"He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it
was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed,
when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to
contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or he
modelled little groups and figures in clay."

2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this,
that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by
the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their
impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking
sonnet, hit it when he wrote:

"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
_And something of the Shorter Catechist_."

_Something_! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism,
its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings
of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably
awakens, was much with him--the sense of reprobation and the gloom born
of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect--the
Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-
devilries--Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only
never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of
life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in
this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it h