48 Sir Sidney Colvin [Feb. 10, 



on record. " Divers et ondoyant," in the phrase of Montaigne, 

 beyond other men — more human, in his own phrase, than he found 

 quite convenient — Stevenson seemed to contain within himself a 

 whole troop of singularly assorted characters. He was a man of in- 

 finite jest and yet infinite earnest, the one very often a mask for the 

 other. He was a poet, with the poet's senses as well as the poet's 

 mind ; a man, for all his lack of health, of strong appetites and un- 

 checked curiosities : a Bohemian, impatient of restraint and shams : 

 and yet a profoundly sincere moralist and preacher and son of the 

 Covenanters after his fashion, deeply conscious of the war within his 

 members, and deeply bent on acting up to the best he knew. Not 

 the negative and cautious, but the active and glowing and enterprising 

 virtues were those on which his heart were set. He was prone to 

 plunge into difficult social passes and ethical dilemmas, which might 

 sometimes more wisely have been avoided, for the sake of trying to 

 behave in them to the utmost according to his own personal sense of 

 the ol)ligations of honour, duty, and kindness. Such a man could 

 not but often expose himself, and make slips and errors in life ; 

 but he was always cheerfully ready to pay, and singularly free from 

 sentimentality towards himself and others. At tlie same time he had 

 a limitless charity of the heart : and, through all his many moods and 

 phases of being, the law of kindness — which is quite a different thing 

 from a weak indulgence— was the one ruling law of his life. From 

 certain faults, from the fretfulness of vanity, from self-seeking, 

 jealousy, or the shadow of the possibility of meanness, he was abso- 

 lutely free. He had every kind of courage, the active, delighting in 

 danger, and the passive, unshaken in the cheerfulness of endurance. 

 Sympathetic like a woman, engaging like a child, with every faculty 

 of his soul as well as every farthing in his purse always at the service 

 of those in trouble, he was not only the most endearing of companions 

 but the most devotedly warm-hearted and serviceable of friends. 



No wonder if readers like to get as closely into touch wdth such a 

 spirit as they can. Since his death the veils of reticence have been 

 to a great extent lifted, and the character made more fully known, by 

 the pu])lication of selections from his letters, which I daresay many 

 of you know. I am busy preparing a new edition, which will contain 

 about one hundred and fifty new letters and furnish a continuous and 

 pretty complete autobiography in that form. These letters illustrate 

 as nothing else does his surprising play of being and variety of mood. 

 In them he tosses and tumbles about, irresponsibly and rhapsodically, 

 the whole I'esources of his vocabulary — or his many vocabularies — to 

 communicate the affection or impression, the thought or silence, mood 

 or freak, of the moment. They are the only things left of him that 

 convey any impression of his talk. Some readers may even like them 

 better than the delibei'ate results of liis exquisitely studied literary art. 

 When I open a letter at random and find it beginning, " My bosom's 

 lord " (bosom's lord, you remember, is from the great speech of Romeo 



