with a face like a ham and an eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of whole-hearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the

dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in The Ebb Tide.

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that

cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the other sex. in awaking; the heroine of The Black Arrow is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in The Master of Ballantrae, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of Kidnapped are real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the book;-but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must

Stevenson's curiosity was late

stand over until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous passes.

One character must never be passed over in an estimate of Stevenson's work. The hero of his longest work is not David Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but a very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself. But Alan Breck Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild Highland clansman. 'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner of murder (for them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel

some as a turkey-cock, and as vain and sensitive as a child, Alan Breck is one of the most lovable characters in all literature; and his penetration—a great part of which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle through a throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his tail'-blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and things.

6

The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. To combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in

perfect style, this thing has never yet

been done. A great part of Stevenson's

subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest

outlet in his essays. In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the vision of most writers and thinkers. has an unerring instinct for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his lately published Amateur Emigrant he describes one of his fellow-passengers to America:

He

'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful