nd the Stevensons
alike--and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often far-removed
fancies we have the finest and most effective witness of it."

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the
inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct contact and
contrast in an article he wrote in _The Daily Chronicle_ on the
appearance of the _Letters to Family and Friends_.

"These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of those
sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the
light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, 'heartless and happy,
lackeying their god.' The strains of his heredity were very
curiously, but very clearly, mingled. It may surprise some readers to
find him speaking of 'the family evil, despondency,' but he spoke with
knowledge. He inherited from his father not only a stern Scottish
intentness on the moral aspect of life ('I would rise from the dead to
preach'), but a marked disposition to melancholy and hypochondria.
From his mother, on the other hand, he derived, along with his
physical frailty, a resolute and cheery stoicism. These two elements
in his nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from
without--ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions--were
by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul. His
spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and
conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is clear
that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his
bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable
distance of Carlylean gloom. He was twenty-four when he wrote thus,
from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:

"'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just
manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work. I
lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside
of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short
walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my
father in the evening. It is surprising how it suits me, and how
happy I keep.'

"This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of fuliginous
elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-consuming faculty,
and an inflexible will to use it. Nine years later he thus admoni