When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of Thrawn Janet, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in Catriona, are grotesque imaginations of the school of Tam o' Shanter rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken. Even The Strange Case ✓ of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the story of The Bottle Imp are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted deeper than these

in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of Will o' the Mill and the grim history of Markheim. Each of these stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at

last upon his travels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep:

'Ah! might I, by thy good grace,
Groping in the windy stair,
(Darkness and the breath of space

Like loud waters everywhere,)
Meeting mine own image there
Face to face,

Send it from that place to her!'

but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare before him his motives and his history. At the close of that wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imagination quickened and

strengthened when it played full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle

games.

III. MORALITY.-His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly rich, in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work-unless the two short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions—in which romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside The Scarlet Letter or The Marble Faun for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do

the gist of his reflective wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories.

A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be broken by the fall of china the morality without which life would be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the feel