ago--maintained the call for this as for
other kinds of story. But partly mere love of change, partly the
observations of those critics who were not content to follow the fashion
merely, and partly also the familiar but inexplicable rise at the same
time of divers persons whose talent inclined in a new direction, brought
in, about 1880 or later, a demand for romance, for historical romance,
and for the short story--three things against which the taste of the
circulating-library reader during the generation then expiring had
distinctly set itself. The greater part of the results of this change
falls out of our subject; but one remarkable name, perhaps the most
remarkable of all, is given to us by the Fates.

For one of the pillars of this new building of romance was only too soon
removed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (more commonly known to the
public by the first two, and to his friends by the second of his
Christian names) belonged to the famous family of lighthouse architects
who so long carried on the traditions of Smeaton in that department of
engineering; and he was to have been an engineer himself. But he was
incurably literary; and after school and college at Edinburgh, was
called to the Bar, with no more practical results in that profession
than in the other. Born on 13th November 1850, he was not extremely
precocious in publication; and it was not till nearly the end of the
seventies that his essays in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and his stories in
a periodical called _London_, short lived and not widely circulated,
but noteworthy in its way, attracted attention. He followed them up
with two volumes of somewhat Sternian travel, _An Inland Voyage_ (1878)
and _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_ (1879); next collecting his
_Cornhill Essays_ in two other volumes, _Virginibus Puerisque_ (1881)
and _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ (1882), and his _London_ stories
in _The New Arabian Nights_ (1882). But he did not get hold of the
public till a year later than the latest of these dates, with his famous
_Treasure Island_, the best boys' story since Marryat, and one of a
literary excellence to which Marryat could make no pretensions. The vein
of romance which he then struck, and the older and more fanciful one of
_The New Arabian Nights_, were followed up alternately or together in an
almost annual succession of books--_Prince Otto_ (1885), _The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ (1886), _Kidnapped_ (1886), _T