with the plunge from courtly artificialities into the open air and Nature unadorned. The character drawing is as firm as elsewhere. The Miller, the Scotch Colonel, the English Traveller, the demirep Countess, the sensualist Conspirator, all these bite the steel with cleancut lines. Yes, Prince Otto is the Stevensonian crux; like not that and you are no true Stevensonian.
Of his more recent excursions in company with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne there is little need to speak—he could not ride tandem. Touches there are in The Wrecker and the rest which recall the unadulterate Stevenson, but they are few and far between. Those books should form no part of his luggage on his journey to the House of Fame.
Nor will he carry with him up the hill his volumes of verse, attractive though they be in many respects. But their attraction lies not in themselves, but rather in the fact that Stevenson wrote them. That applies even to the Child's Book of Verses, unique as it is. If we contrast it with the Songs of Innocence, we see how Stevenson has failed to transmute verse into poetry. He was emphatically a speaker, not a singer.
All his qualities coalesced when he came to deal with his own life as a young man in the Memories and Portraits, and with the life of
