paper, where it made no great stir.
But, on its publication in volume form, with the vastly better title,
the book at once 'boomed,' as the phrase goes, to an extent then, in
1882, almost unprecedented. The secret of its immense success may
almost be expressed in a phrase by saying that it is a book like
_Gulliver's Travels_, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Robinson Crusoe_
itself for all ages--boys, men, and women."

Which just shows how far lapse as to a fact may lead to critical
misreadings also.

Mr Hammerton sometimes lets good folks say in his pages, without
correction, what is certainly not correct. Thus at one place we are told
that Stevenson was only known as Louis in print, whereas that was the
only name by which he was known in his own family. Then Mr Gosse, at p.
34, is allowed to write:

"Professor Blackie was among them on the steamer from the Hebrides, a
famous figure that calls for no description, and a voluble shaggy man,
clad in homespun, with spectacles forward upon his nose, who it was
whispered to us, was Mr Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician, _a water-
colour painter of some repute_, who was to die in 1878."

Mr Sam Bough _was_ "a water-colour painter of some repute," but a painter
in oils of yet greater repute--a man of rare strength, resource, and
facility--never, perhaps, wholly escaping from some traces of his early
experiences in scene-painting, but a true genius in his art. Ah, well I
remember him, though an older man, yet youthful in the band of young
Scotch artists among whom as a youngster I was privileged to move in
Edinburgh--Pettie, Chalmers, M'Whirter, Peter Graham, MacTaggart,
MacDonald, John Burr, and Bough. Bough could be voluble on art; and many
a talk I had with him as with the others named, especially with John
Burr. Bough and he both could talk as well as paint, and talk right
well. Bough had a slight cast in the eye; when he got a _wee_ excited on
his subject he would come close to you with head shaking, and spectacles
displaced, and forelock wagging, and the cast would seem to die away. Was
this a fact, or was it an illusion on my part? I have often asked myself
that question, and now I ask it of others. Can any of my good friends in
Edinburgh say; can Mr Caw help me here, either to confirm or to correct
me? I venture to insert here an anecdote, with which my friend of old
days, Mr Wm. MacTaggart, R.S.A., in a letter kindly favou