the unknown god of art; the sombre in-
variable citizen, whose garb gives no sug-
gestion of his occupation or his tastes-a
person,
it would seem, only by courtesy ;
the piano-organ the music of the day, and
the hideous voice of the vendor of half-

penny papers the music of the night;
could anything be less promising than
such a row of houses for the theatre of
romance? Set a realist to walk down one
of these streets: he will inquire about milk-
bills and servants' wages, latch-keys and
Sunday avocations, and come back with
a tale of small meannesses and petty
respectabilities written in the approved
modern fashion. Yet Stevenson, it seems
likely, could not pass along such a line
of brick bandboxes without having his
pulses set a-throbbing by the imagina-
tive possibilities of the place. Of his

own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he

says:

'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four million private lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly.'

It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside. also, in The Rajah's Diamond, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and

So

his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief. A monotony of bad building is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the agonies of the mind of man.

To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every work of human hands became vocal with possible associations. Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 'vera weel preserved,' gave him the cardinal incident of Kidnapped. How should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their story, in whose

mind the effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,' called up ‘an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and

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familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium.

His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gift of life was one prolonged passion of praise and joy. There is none of his books that reads like the meditations of an invalid. He has the readiest sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer. Of one of his earlier books he says: From the negative point of view I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to con

siderably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.' And this was an omission that he never remedied in his later works. Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived in the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that it seems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been dowered with better health.

'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took

The way that takes the town, *

Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book,
And wrap me in a gown,'

says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have ruffled it with the best at the court of King James. But from Stevenson, although not only