lid enough, and his range of
sympathies a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other
hand, the devil's advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of
them being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or an
incapacity for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted
by _Catriona_, not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charming
and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant; but the other was something of a
true bill to the last. It was Stevenson's weakness (as by the way it
also was Scott's) to huddle up his stories rather than to wind them off
to an orderly conclusion.

But against this allowance--a just but an ample one--for defects, must
be set to Stevenson's credit such a combination of literary and
story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Merimee has ever
equalled; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden
perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance has a
more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality. Generally, as in the
famous examples of Scott, of Dumas, and of Balzac, the great
story-tellers have been a little deficient in mere style; the fault in
Stevenson, if it could be called a fault, was that the style was in
excess. But this only set off and enhanced, it did not account for, the
magic of his scene and character, from John Silver to Barbara Grant,
from "The Suicide Club" to the escapes of Alan Breck. Very early, when
most of his critical friends were urging him to cultivate the essay
mainly, others discerned the supremacy of his story-telling faculty,
and, years before the public fell in love with _Treasure Island_, bade
him cultivate that. Fortunately he did so; and his too short life has
left a fairly ample store of work, not always quite equal, seldom quite
without a flaw, but charming, stimulating, distinguished as few things
in this last quarter of a century have been.

Nearly all of Mr. Stevenson's contemporaries in novel-writing, as well
as many distinguished persons far his seniors whose names will occur to
every one, lie outside our limits. And in no chapter of this book,
perhaps, is it so necessary to turn the back sternly on much interesting
performance once famous and popular--not once only of interest to the
reader of time and chance but put by this cause or that out of our
reach. We cannot talk here of _Emilia Wyndham_ or _Paul Ferroll_, both
emphatically novels of their day, and that no short one; and in the
latter