1911] on Robert Louis Stevenson. 35 



AVestininster, and saw newspaper posters flappins^ at the street corners 

 with the words " Death of R. L. Stevenson " printed large upon 

 them. Judge what a light went out of my world with the reading. 

 Nor was it a light extinguished only for his friends and those who 

 had been familiar with the charm of his character and presence. So 

 well had he spent his time, in the teeth of cruel hindrances from 

 ill-health and mortal weakness, that it was a light extinguished for 

 all those who cared for the English tongue and for English letters 

 throughout the world. 



For what had this frail Scottish youth done with his life and 

 talents in the interval since that summer week when he was my 

 companion in the Siiffolk lanes and garden ? At school and college 

 the most notorious of truants and reputed idlers, once his way of life 

 determined he had stuck to his chosen art with an intense tenacity 

 of industry under circumstances often cruelly trying. After four or 

 five years of prentice work, always aiming at the highest, never 

 satisfied with what he had done, toiling, as he says of himself after 

 Balzac, like a miner buried under a fall of earth, he began about his 

 twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth year to impress a small circle of 

 judicious readers by the charm and vividness of the short tales, 

 parables, essays, and notes of travel, which appeared in magazines 

 under the signature " R. L. S." His first three books, " The Inland 

 Voyage," " Travels with a Donkey," and " Picturesque Notes on 

 Edinburgh," the two former now classics in their dainty cameo kind, 

 had been published when suddenly, in August 1879, he left us all, 

 parents and friends, to risk his whole life on what seemed to us a 

 desperate gambler's throw for happiness. Taking no money and 

 expecting none from his father, travelling to California and living 

 there under a double strain of mental anxiety and self-imposed hard- 

 ship beneath which a strong man might have broken down, he fought 

 as hard a six month's fight as is recorded in the life of almost any 

 man of letters. Then he fell sick almost to death, recovered partially 

 though never fully, and came back after a year's absence with the 

 wife whom he went out determined to make his own at all costs. 

 Reconciled to his family, dearer than ever to his friends, he remained 

 a stricken man in health, and for seven years lived the cramped life 

 of an invalid, spending at first the winters at Davos and the summers 

 in the Highlands, then trying Marseilles and Hyeres, where he had 

 a few months' respite from illness, then lastly settling for two years 

 and a half at Bournemouth. Throughout this period he was debarred 

 by weakness from almost all exercise, and kept never far froui the 

 risk of death by hemorrhage of the kings. 



To his adventurous, active, outdoor spirit the restrictions and 

 deprivations of the sickroom were galling in the extreme. But he 

 never let them quench his spirit, or even his spirits. He remained 

 inextinguishably gay and charming to those about him ; as inspired 

 and inspiring a talker as ever, when he was allowed to talk at all — 



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