Academy a series of papers on the Parnassiens-de Banville, Coppée, Soulary, and Prudhomme-and when this was not accepted, he devoted a good deal of his time to the study of the French literature of the fifteenth century, which resulted in the articles. on Villon and Charles of Orleans. The same reading led to the experiments in the French verse metres of that date which were almost contemporary with the work of Mr. Andrew Lang and of Mr. Austin Dobson, who brought the Ballade and Rondeau back to favour in England.

To 1876 we owe the only piece of dramatic criticism that Stevenson ever published, and four articles in the Cornhill Magazine, which from this time onward marked all his contributions to its pages with the initials R. L. S.

The same year thrice saw the rejection of the article on "Some Portraits by Raeburn," afterwards included in Virginibus Puerisque. It was refused in turn by the Cornhill, the Pall Mall Gazette, and Blackwood's Magazine, though it is only fair to Stephen to say that he helped the author in trying to place it elsewhere.

The event of this year was, of course, the canoe voyage. Stevenson, as we have already seen, had for some time shared his friends' taste for navigating the Firth of Forth in these craft, which the enthusiasm of "Rob Roy" Macgregor had made popular ten years before. A good deal of time was spent, as we have seen, on the river at Grez, and canoes were introduced there by the English colony, headed by Sir Walter Simpson and his brother, and by R. A. M.

Stevenson, who devised a leather canoe of his own "with a niche for everything," and, as his friends. said, "a place for nothing." Mr. Warington BadenPowell had published in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine in 1870 the log of the Nautilus and Isis canoes on a journey through Sweden and on the Baltic. But the idea of the journey itself seems to have been suggested by Our Autumn Holiday on French Rivers, by Mr. J. L. Molloy, published in 1874, the account of a journey up the Seine and down the Loire in a four-oared outrigger.

That the cruise itself was on the whole rather a cheerless experience is seen by the following letter. "Compiègne, 9th Sept. 1876. [Canoe Voyage.]

"We have had deplorable weather quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers; and generally much wind and cold wind forby.. I must say it has sometimes required a stout heart; and sometimes one could not help sympathising inwardly with the French folk who hold up their hands in astonishment over our pleasure journey. . . . I wake at six every morning; and we are generally in bed and asleep before half-past nine. Last night I found my way to my room with a dark cloud of sleep over my shoulders, so thick that the candle burnt red at about the hour of 8.40. If that isn't healthy, egad, I wonder what is."

But to this voyage and its tranquil setting the irony of Time has since given a fresh and strange interest. The route of the canoes was by canal from Antwerp to Brussels, and thence (after a train jour

ney) from Maubeuge by the rivers Sambre and Oise to Pontoise near the Seine. The central part of their course lay through places whose names became familiar to foreign ears in 1914, and now fill our memories with associations wholly different from the peaceful tenour of a holiday voyage. Maubeuge, Landrecies, Moy, La Fère, Chauny, Noyon, Précy, and the rivers Aisne and Oise are well known now to many brave men who have never heard of the Inland Voyage or its author. But even when Stevenson was traversing these waters the French nation was preparing by autumn manœuvres for the great struggle of forty years later, and through his descriptions there runs the military note. At Compiègne "Reservery and general Militarismus (as the Germans call it) were rampant. A camp of conical white tents without the town looked like a leaf out of a picture Bible; sword belts decorated the walls of the cafés; and the streets kept sounding all day long to military. music." German shells from the siege of La Fère still embellished the inn-room at Moy: at "La Fère of Cursed Memory" itself the artillery were practising, and the town was full of military reservists, who "walked speedily and wore their formidable greatcoats." And of Landrecies he wrote: "It was just the place to hear the round going by at night in the darkness, with the solid tramp of men marching, and the startling reverberations of the drum. It reminded you that even this place was a point in the great warfaring system of Europe, and might on some future day be ringed about with cannon smoke and thunder, and make itself a name among strong towns."

CHAPTER VII

TRANSITION—1876–79

"You may paddle all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek."

The concluding words of "An Inland Voyage."

HE next three years of Stevenson's life were so closely similar to the three preceding, that at

first sight, but for his own selection of the age of five-and-twenty as the limit of youth, it might seem almost unnecessary to draw any division between them. He continued to spend his time between France, London, and Edinburgh, to lead a more or less independent life, and to give the best of his talents and industry to his now recognised profession. The year 1877 was marked by the acceptance of the first of his stories ever printed-A Lodging for the Night-and from that date his fiction began to take its place beside, and gradually to supersede, the essays with which his career had opened. The month of May 1878 saw not only the appearance of his first book-An Inland Voyage—but also the beginning of his two first serial publications-the New Arabian Nights and the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh; and they were followed at the end of the year by the Edinburgh in book form, and in June 1879 by the Travels with a Donkey. All these, however, were but

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a measure of the author's growing reputation, and of the facility with which he could now find a publisher.

Original as these writings were, and unlike the work of his contemporaries, none of them constituted any new departure in his life or any alteration in his attitude to the world: and the change that now came arrived from another quarter. His friendships, as we have seen, counted for a great deal with Stevenson, and though the roll of them was not yet closed, and ended indeed only at his death, it was at the beginning of this period that he made the acquaintance which affected him more than any other-he now met for the first time the lady who was afterwards to be his wife.

Already it is becoming difficult to realise that there was a time not long distant when study for all the professions, including that of art, was hedged about with arbitrary restrictions for women. At the date of which I am speaking these limitations had been removed to some extent in Paris as far as the studios were concerned, but the natural consequences had not yet followed in country quarters, and women artists were as yet unknown in any of the colonies about Fontainebleau. Hitherto these societies had been nearly as free from the female element as were afterwards the early novels of Stevenson himself: the landlady, the chambermaid, the peasant girl passed across the stage, but the leading rôles were filled by men alone. But when Stevenson and Sir Walter Simpson, the "Arethusa" and the "Cigarette," came from the Inland Voyage to their quarters at Grez.