Stevenson had not to complain, with Sir Thomas More, that readers of books were so "unkind and ungenteel that though they take great pleasure and delectation in the work, yet, for all that, they cannot find in their hearts to love the author thereof"; for though he was exiled from his native land, yet he lived in the heart of every reading man, not only because he was a great writer, but also because he was a bright soul with faith in God and man.
Fourteen years ago our author laid down in the Fortnightly Review the "two duties incumbent on any man who enters on the business of writing truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment." One dares to say without rebuke to-day, that he fulfilled his own conditions, for he saw life whole and he wrote of it with sympathy. He brought also to his task a delicate genius, which gave him an almost solitary place. It was difficult to name a living artist in words that could be compared with him who reminded us at every turn of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. There are certain who compel words to serve them and never travel without an imperial body guard; but words waited on Stevenson like "nimble servitors," and he went where he pleased in his simplicity because everyone flew to anticipate his wishes. His style had the thread of gold, and he was the perfect type of the man of letters a humanist whose Greek joy in the beautiful was annealed to a fine purity by his Scottish faith; whose kinship was not with Boccacio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser. His was the Magical touch than no man can explain or acquire; it belongs to those only who have drunk at the Pierian spring. There is a place at the marriage feast for every honest writer, but we judge that our master will go to the high table and sit down with Virgil and Shakespeare and Goethe and Scott.
The mists of his native land and its wild traditions passed into his blood so that he was at home in two worlds. In one book he would analyse human character with such weird power that the reader shudders because a stranger has been within his soul; in another he hurries you along a breathless story of adventure till your imagination fails from exhaustion. Never did he weary us with the pedantry of modern problems. Nor did he dally with foul vices to serve the ends of purity. Nor did he feed
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools."
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