tive creations which are as real and as widely known as any historical figures. During those years much of his time was also spent in writing plays and dramatic sketches, for the most part in collaboration with Mr Henley. A volume containing four of the plays which they completed between 1880 and 1885, Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, Admiral Guinea, and Macaire, was published in 1892. Neither author had any notable dramatic gift. Two of the four plays have been produced on the stage, but rather as literary curiosities than as pieces which could attract the public, or which had any essential vitality. The best that can be said of Stevenson's plays is that they are not feebler or more ineffective

than Scott's.

But by this time Stevenson had turned to a field for romance with which he was, alike by birth and training, peculiarly qualified to deal-Scotland of the eighteenth century. A passionate lover of Scotland and the Scottish character, he had also since boyhood been a student of Scottish history, and was versed in the annals of both the Whigs and the Jacobites. The celebrated political and criminal trials of that period had been his favourite reading as a student of law and a briefless advocate. He had planned and begun to collect materials for more than one historical work dealing with Scotland between 1660 and 1800. Edinburgh still in his boyhood retained a tradition of the period when it was a centre of national life as various, crowded, and thrilling as had ever been in Athens or Florence. And the eighteenth century had from the first strongly attracted his imagination. At the age of four-and-twenty he had written of it in words of quite remarkable insight and sympathy: 'the spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bagwigs, the clink of glasses at night in fire-lit parlours, something certain and civic and domestic,' and yet withal in the fullest sense of the word romantic. Where the great magician had been, it might seem presumptuous to follow; but the field from which Scott had reaped with so large and careless, yet so sure and fine a hand, still left ample resources for the new methods which the mere lapse of half a century necessarily implied. To this period and setting belong the four works which are the core and consummation of Stevenson's achievement in romance: Kidnapped (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), Catriona (1893), and Weir of Hermiston, left a fragment at the author's death.

In 1887 Stevenson's lung-disease had become so serious that neither the English nor the French Riviera was any longer a safe refuge for him. He left England that autumn in order to spend the winter in the dry air of the Adirondack Mountains at Lake Saranac, and from that time never returned to Europe. The charming volume of poems, Underwoods, was published just after

his departure. In verse Stevenson was only a brilliant amateur; but these poems have all the curious fascination that attaches to the work of a trained artist who diverges for his own amusement into an alien though cognate art. The same year was issued the collected volume of short stories entitled The Merry Men; and in the following year The Black Arrow, a romance of adventure of which the scene is laid in England during the Wars of the Roses. Here, as always when he went back beyond the eighteenth century, his touch is uncertain and his success very imperfect. With the Middle Ages he had no sympathy; and the fifteenth century, although it lies beyond the Middle Ages properly so called, was almost equally alien from him. In the summer of 1888 the voyage in the Southern Pacific, which had been one of his cherished dreams since boyhood, was actually undertaken. The climate there was favourable; the semi-barbaric and adventurous life of the Polynesian Islands fascinated him; and after wanderings in the South Seas extending over nearly two years, he bought a piece of land in Samoa and settled there for the remainder of his life. Through the six years spent by him in the South Seas he was writing constantly. The petty politics of Samoa absorbed much of his interest; but his journals and letters failed to arouse any great corresponding interest in the audience for whom he wrote. Nor did he obtain any striking success by his stories of life in the islands (the Island Nights Entertainments of 1893 and The Ebb-tide of 1894), though they contain much admirable description and characterisation. He went on, however, at the same time working on his main central line, and whenever he laid his scene in Scotland, his certainty of touch and vigour of handling remained almost unimpaired. In another work of this period, The Wrecker (1892), he made an attempt at filling a larger canvas, working into it the suggestions and memories of his earlier life in Edinburgh and among the artists of Paris and Fontainebleau, with his later experiences of California and the Pacific. The result was a strangely amorphous and ineffective book, containing much excellent work that is on the whole wasted. The two works last named, and some others of minor importance, were written in collaboration with his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne. By this time physical debility had greatly affected Stevenson's power of continuous or constructive work. St Ives, the story of the adventures of a French prisoner of war in Great Britain during the Napoleonic wars, is perhaps the weakest and most flaccid of all his romances. He left it incomplete; but its own vitality, no less than his, was already exhausted. In the last months of his life he was able to rally his powers for a last effort, and the opening chapters of Weir of Hermiston (the scene of which is again in Scotland towards the end of the eighteenth century) are on a level with his best and finest work. But

this was the last flare of a dying flame. On the 3rd of December 1894 he died suddenly in his home at Vailima in Samoa.

Great as is the positive and essential merit of Stevenson's work when at its best, it is as an influence in letters and in thought that his position is ✓ most notable. In some respects he is an interesting parallel to William Hazlitt, a writer whom, both in substance and manner, he took in youth for one of his chief models. If to Hazlitt may be applied the caustic saying of Voltaire, Sa réputation s'affermira toujours, parce qu' on le lit guère, so more than half of the various and unequal work that fills the long shelf of Stevenson's collected works will probably become the possession of a small circle of men of letters and be disregarded or forgotten by the wider public. The same fate has already overtaken De Quincey, who likewise resembles Stevenson in multifariousness, in a certain extravagance and whimsicality of mind, and in the possession of a style of great fascination and marked individuality, highly artificial in origin and construction, but become a second nature to its author, and handled with perfect ease and consummate skill. Stevenson as an essayist stands apart from both in virtue of his refined and subtle psychology as a romance-writer he belongs to a different order of literature. The name by which he was known among the native Samoans, Tusitala, 'the teller of tales,' is that on which his permanent reputation will rest. His delight in stories of adventure was that of a boy, and his story-telling instinct (one of the rarest of literary qualities) unsurpassed within the limits which his nature had assigned to him. He was one of those persons who in a sense never outgrow their boyhood. As has been already remarked, one half of the human race remained for him throughout life almost a sealed book. I have never pleased myself with any women of mine,' he wrote towards the end of his life; and the criticism is just. Even his men are for the most part larger children. But of the romance of boyhood and adolescence, and, going still farther back, of the feelings and inner life of childhood, he is an unsurpassed master. Even the philosophy of life developed in both his essays and his romances is that rather of a gifted boy than of a mature man. Like his style, it was fully developed in him by the age of five-and-twenty; and it underwent no change thereafter except, in his last years, an imperceptible and silent reversion towards the traditions of his birth and blood. He has been called, not unjustly, the best loved of modern writers; and the Gods, according to the Greek saying, also loved him: for he died young.

From 'Notes on Edinburgh.'

The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced

gardens she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch at sunset the spark of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.

But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire angrily after that Somewhere else of the imagination, where all troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town with the Old-that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern temple of the winds -and watch the trains smoking out from under them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take a pride in their old home.

Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a workman's quarter and among breweries and gasworks. It is a house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom levées, and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes. For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace reawakened and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six

and clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heathermixture trowser below, and the men themselves trudg ing in the mud among unsympathetic bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the springtime-or say one morning rather, at the peep of day-late folk may hear the voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High Street; and a little after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many men singing a psalm in unison from another church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments-the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life.

From 'Kidnapped.'

The next day Mr Henderland found for me a man who had a boat of his own and was to cross the Linnhe Loch that afternoon into Appin, fishing. Him he prevailed on to take me, for he was one of his flock; and in this way I saved a long day's travel and the price of two public ferries I must otherwise have passed.

It was near noon before we set out; a dark day with clouds, and the sun shining upon little patches. The sea was here very deep and still, and had scarce a wave upon it; so that I must put the water to my lips before I could believe it to be truly salt. The mountains on either side were high, rough and barren, very black and gloomy in the shadow of the clouds, but all silver-laced with little watercourses where the sun shone upon them. It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as Alan did.

There was but one thing to mention. A little after we had started, the sun shone upon a little moving clump of scarlet close in along the waterside to the

north. It was much of the same red as soldiers' coats; every now and then, too, there came little sparks and lightnings, as though the sun had struck upon bright steel.

I asked my boatman what it should be; and he answered he supposed it was some of the red soldiers coming from Fort William into Appin, against the poor tenantry of the country. Well, it was a sad sight to me; and whether it was because of my thoughts of Alan, or from something prophetic in my bosom, although this was but the second time I had seen King George's troops, I had no good-will to them.

At last we came so near the point of land at the entering in of Loch Leven that I begged to be set on shore. My boatman (who was an honest fellow and mindful of his promise to the catechist) would fain have carried me on to Balachulish; but as this was to take me farther from my secret destination, I insisted, and was set on shore at last under the wood of Lettermore (or Lettervore, for I have heard it both ways) in Alan's country of Appin.

This was a wood of birches, growing on a steep, craggy side of a mountain that overhung the loch. It had many openings and ferny howes; and a road or bridle track ran north and south through the midst of it, by the edge of which, where was a spring, I sat down to eat some oat-bread of Mr Henderland's, and think upon my situation.

Here I was not only troubled by a cloud of stinging midges, but far more by the doubts of my mind.

What

I ought to do, why I was going to join myself with an outlaw and a would-be murderer like Alan, whether I should not be acting more like a man of sense to tramp back to the south country direct, by my own guidance and at my own charges, and what Mr Campbell or even Mr Henderland would think of me if they should ever learn my folly and presumption: these were the doubts that now began to come in on me stronger than ever.

As I was so sitting and thinking, a sound of men and horses came to me through the wood; and presently after, at a turning of the road, I saw four travellers come into view. The way was in this part so rough and narrow that they came single and led their horses by the reins. The first was a great, red-headed gentleman, of an imperious and flushed face, who carried his hat in his hand and fanned himself, for he was in a breathing heat. The second, by his decent black garb and white wig, I correctly took to be a lawyer. The third was a servant, and wore some part of his clothes in tartan, which showed that his master was of a Highland family, and either an outlaw or else in singular good odour with the Government, since the wearing of tartan was against the Act. If I had been better versed in these things, I would have known the tartan to be of the Argyle (or Campbell) colours. This servant had a good-sized portmanteau strapped on his horse, and a net of lemons (to brew punch with) hanging at the saddle-bow; as was often enough the custom with luxurious travellers in that part of the country.

As for the fourth, who brought up the tail, I had seen his like before, and knew him at once to be a sheriff's officer.

I had no sooner seen these people coming than I made up my mind (for no reason that I can tell) to go through with my adventure; and when the first came alongside

of me, I rose up from the bracken and asked him the way to Aucharn.

He stopped and looked at me, as I thought, a little oddly; and then, turning to the lawyer, Mungo,' said he, there's many a man would think this more of a warning than two pyats. Here am I on my road to Duror on the job ye ken; and here is a young lad starts up out of the bracken, and speers if I am on the way to Aucharn.'

'Glenure,' said the other, this is an ill subject for jesting.'

These two had now drawn close up and were gazing at me, while the two followers had halted about a stonecast in the rear.

'And what seek ye in Aucharn?' said Colin Roy Campbell of Glenure; him they called the Red Fox; for he it was that I had stopped.

"The man that lives there,' said I.

'James of the Glens,' says Glenure, musingly; and then to the lawyer: Is he gathering his people, think ye?'

'Anyway,' says the lawyer, 'we shall do better to bide where we are, and let the soldiers rally us.'

'If you are concerned for me,' said I, 'I am neither of his people nor yours, but an honest subject of King George, owing no man and fearing no man.'

'Why, very well said,' replies the Factor. But if I may make so bold as ask, what does this honest man so far from his country? and why does he come seeking the brother of Ardshiel? I have power here, I must tell you. I am King's Factor upon several of these estates, and have twelve files of soldiers at my back.'

'I have heard a waif word in the country,' said I, a little nettled, that you were a hard man to drive.'

He still kept looking at me, as if in doubt. 'Well,' said he, at last, 'your tongue is bold; but I am no unfriend to plainness. If ye had asked me the way to the door of James Stewart on any other day but this, I would have set ye right and bidden ye God speed. But to-day-eh, Mungo?' And he turned again to look at the lawyer.

But just as he turned there came the shot of a firelock from higher up the hill; and with the very sound of it Glenure fell upon the road.

'O, I am dead!' he cried, several times over.

The lawyer had caught him up and held him in his arms, the servant standing over and clasping his hands. And now the wounded man looked from one to another with scared eyes, and there was a change in his voice that went to the heart.

sideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pedicu lous malady; swelling in tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming ;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little,

cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. (From Across the Plains.)

From 'Underwoods.'

It is the season now to go
About the country high and low,
Among the lilacs hand in hand,
And two by two in fairy land,

The brooding boy, the sighing maid,
Wholly fain and half afraid,
Now meet along the hazel'd brook
To pass and linger, pause and look.

A year ago, and blithely paired,

Their rough-and-tumble play they shared ;
They kissed and quarrelled, laughed and cried,
A year ago at Eastertide.

With bursting heart, with fiery face,
She strove against him in the race;
He unabashed her garter saw,

That now would touch her skirts with awe.

Now by the stile ablaze she stops,
And his demurer eyes he drops;
Now they exchange averted sighs
Or stand and marry silent eyes.

And he to her a hero is,

And sweeter she than primroses,
Their common silence dearer far
Than nightingale and mavis are.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, And hear no more at all.

(No. xliii.; To S. R. Crockett, on receiving a dedication.) The only complete collection of Stevenson's works is the Edinburgh edition in twenty-eight volumes (1894-98); but most of his romances, essays, and miscellaneous writings are in general circulation. His Life, by Mr Graham Balfour (2 vols. 1901), does little more than supplement the two volumes of Letters to his Family and Friends, edited by Mr Sidney Colvin (1899). Some further biographical details are given in R. L. Stevenson's Edinburgh Days, by Miss E. B. Simpson (1898). Out of the hundreds of critical articles on the man and his work which have appeared during the later years of his life and since his death, few are of any substantial value. Among those which are, two only are of sufficient importance to demand mention: Mr Colvin's prefacereally an informal biography-to the two volumes of letters just mentioned, and Professor W. Raleigh's able, if somewhat academic, appreciation, R. L. Stevenson (1895).

J. W. MACKAIL.

John Churton Collins, born in 1848 in Gloucestershire, studied at Balliol, has written much for the reviews and magazines, edited works of Tourneur, Herbert of Cherbury, Greene, Dryden, Tennyson, and written books on Sir Joshua Reynolds, on Bolingbroke and on Voltaire in England, and on Swift, besides A Study of English Literature, Illustrations of Tennyson, Essays and Criticisms, and Ephemera Critica.

William Hurrell Mallock, born in 1849 at Cockington Court, Devon, won the Newdigate in 1871 whilst at Balliol, Oxford. He made a hit with The New Republic (1877) and The New Paul and Virginia (1878); has written A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, and other novels; has published a poem on Lucretius and other volumes of verse; and in Aristocracy and Evolution, Religion as a Credible Doctrine, and other works has sought to make serious contributions to the solution of religious, political, and sociological problems.

Henry Rider Haggard, born at Bradenham Hall in Norfolk, 22nd June 1856, and educated at Ipswich Grammar School, held several official positions in South Africa in 1875-79, and on his return was called to the Bar. His first book, Cetewayo and his White Neighbours (1882), attracted little notice; and two novels, Dawn (1884) and The Witch's Head (1885), were only successful after King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887) had by their novelty and imaginative ingenuity won great and immediate popularity. Among his other novels are Jess (1887), Allan Quatermain (1887), Maiwa's Revenge (1888), Cleopatra (1889), Allan's Wife (1890), Nada the Lily (1892), Montezuma's Daughter (1893), Joan Haste (1895), and Swallow, a Story of the Great Trek (1897). The World's Desire (1891) was written in collaboration with Mr Andrew Lang. Mr Haggard is keenly interested in agricultural conditions and problems, and has published A Farmer's Year (1899) and Rural England (1903), a somewhat pessimistic survey of the present agricultural position, based on elaborate personal inquiries.