600 Professor Walter Haleigh [May 17, 



with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no 

 whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing, — the 

 shores of the sea of literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn 

 properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. 

 But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, that from the writer it 

 can pass with perfect trust and perfect fluency to the man. He shares 

 with Goldsmith and Montaigne, his own favourite, the happy privilege 

 of making lovers among his readers. " To be the most beloved of 

 English writers — what a title that is for a man ! " says Thackeray 

 of Goldsmith. In such matters, a dispute for pre-eminence in the 

 captivation of hearts would be unseemly; it is enough to say that 

 Stevenson, too, has his lovers among those who have accompanied him 

 on his ' Inland Voyage,' or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes 

 in the wake of Modestine. He is loved by those who never saw his 

 face ; and one who has scaled that dizzy height of ambition may well 

 be content, without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese 

 have taken London and revised the contents of the British Museum, 

 the yellow scribes whom they shall set to produce a new edition of 

 the ' Biographie Universelle ' will include in their entries the following 

 item : — "Stevenson, B. L. A prolific writer of stories among the 

 aborigines. Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese. His works 

 are lost. 



[W. B.] 





