chiefly critical and social essays, just half of which were in the Cornhill Magazine; two small books of travel; two books in serial instalments, afterwards reprinted; and five short stories also in periodicals. There were besides a few rejected articles, a certain amount of journalism, and at least eight stories or novels, none of which ever saw the light, as well as a play or two and some verses, a small part of which were ultimately included in his published works.

In September, 1873, he wrote: "There is no word of 'Roads'; I suspect the Saturday Review must have looked darkly upon it—so be it; we must just try to do something better." And so, as we have seen, the article appeared in the Portfolio for December. Three weeks later, in a letter to his mother, he expressed the opinion that it is quite the best thing I have ever done, to my taste. There are things expressed in it far harder to express, than in anything else I ever had; and that, after all, is the great point. As for style, ca viendra peut-etre."

66

In 1874 he had five articles in four different magazines: these included "Ordered South" in Macmillan's, and, still more important, the paper on 'Victor Hugo's Romances in the Cornhill. The former, which took him three months to write, was his first work ever republished in its original form; the latter, which was anonymous, but afterwards reappeared in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, marked, in his own judgment, the beginning of his command of style. Long afterwards in Samoa, in answer to a question, he told me that in this essay he had first found himself able to say several things in the way in which he felt they should be said. It may also be noticed that this was his first appearance in the magazine which by the discernment of Leslie Stephen did so much for him in taking his early work.

In January, 1875, Stevenson proposed to The 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 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 Baden-Powell 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, in which Stevenson lets us behind the scenes, and for once even grumbles a little.

"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.”

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

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 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 arbítrary 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, they found the colony in trepidation at the expected arrival of the invader.

The new-comers, however, were neither numerous nor formidable; being only an American lady and her two children-a young girl and a boy. Mrs. Osbourne had seen her domestic happiness break up in California, and had come to France for the education of her family. She and her daughter had thrown themselves with ardour into the pursuit of painting, and thus became acquainted with some of the English and American artists in Paris. After profiting by the opportunities afforded them in the capital, they were in search of country lodgings, and accordingly, having taken counsel with their artist friends, they came to Grez.

So here for the first time Stevenson saw the woman whom Fate had brought half-way across the world to meet him. He straightway fell in love; he knew his own mind, and in spite of all dissuasions and difficulties, his choice never wavered. The difficulties were so great and hope so remote that nothing was said to his parents or to any but two or three of his closest friends. But in the meantime life took on a cheerful hue, and the autumn passed brightly for them all until the middle of October, when Stevenson must return to Edinburgh, there to spend the winter.

In January, 1877, he came to London for a fortnight, and first met Mr. Gosse, who, being immediately added to the ranks of his intimate friends, has given us a most vivid and charming description of the effect produced on strangers at that time by Stevenson.

"It was in 1877, or late in 1876, that I was presented to Stevenson, at the old Savile Club, by Mr. Sidney Colvin, who thereupon left us to our devices. We went downstairs and lunched together,