46 Sir Sidney Colvin [Feb. 10, 



she drowns her child in the sacred river ; in tlie brothel, the discard 

 of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a 

 thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of 

 honour and the touch of pity, often paying the world's scorn with 

 service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, 

 rejecting riches — everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, every- 

 where some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign 

 of man's ineffectual goodness : — Ah ! if I could show you this ! if I 

 could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every 

 stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance 

 of faihire, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely 

 fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on 

 the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls ! 

 They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot ; it is not alone their 

 privilege and glory, but their doom ; they are condemned to some 

 nobility ; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the 

 implacable hunter." 



Viewing human nature in this light, Stevenson was the last man 

 to relieve the children of his creation from the scruples or the pro- 

 blems of conscience. Perfectly unpriggish, often radically unconven- 

 tional, always tempered by the sense of humour, his treatment of such 

 problems is one of the things by which his work is most humanized 

 and enriched, made most fruitful and life-enhancing to the reader. 

 They find their way even into his lightest and most capricious inven- 

 tions—remember tiie case of the young clergyman in the " Rajah's 

 Diamond " — and they nourish and fortify his strongest — it is the 

 commingling of the terrors of conscience with the terrors of the sea 

 that gives the story of the " Merry Men " half its power. Their dis- 

 cussion crops up in unexpected places, but always appropriately to 

 the scene and person, and imparts touches of a serious or a humorous 

 life-wisdom to almost every character in almost every crisis. In one 

 case, that of the stuljborn young Lowlander, David Balfour, his 

 irrepressible scruples of honour and conscience become in the end 

 too much even for a brother Scot, the old and worldly-wise Lord- 

 Advocate Grant. Alan Breck has a queer special morality of his 

 own concerning the blind eye to be turned on the identity of a 

 murderer. Some of you may remember the brilliant little fable in 

 which two of the characters of " Treasure Island," Long John and 

 Captain Smollett, are made to step out of the story between two 

 chapters and discuss the nature of good and evil, and the intentions 

 of the author — under whose guise a greater Author is figured — over 

 their pipes. The very climax of the story " A Lodging for the 

 Night " consists in the brilliant, unanswerable argument of Fran9ois 

 Villon for his own, a thief's, private view of honour and conduct as 

 against those of the self-righteous old nobleman whose life he spared. 

 The whole purport of the latter half of " The Master of Ballantrae " 

 is to exhibit the gradual moral decay of the excellent Henry Durie 



