literary quality, one feels inclined to strike one's colours and to abdicate the critical function.

The aroma and savour of style-this it is which makes Mr. Stevenson's books so uniformly delightful to the literary epicure. There is no alchemy like that of style; it transmutes into gold whatever it touches. Think of the verse of Shakespeare, that wave of sound breaking into a thousand clear ripples of melody, of the interwoven harmonies of Milton, or again, of the unadorned but terribly effective style of Swift, a style which makes us think of a woodman hewing down trees with a mighty swing of the arm: so great is the power, so various the quality of style in literature!

And what are we to say of Mr. Stevenson's style? Hasty readers praise it for its qualities of simplicity and straightforwardness. But simple Mr. Stevenson's style is not; on the contrary, he is one of the most patient, cunning, and dexterous artificers in English prose. Mr. Hardy uses language as a good workman uses his tools; Mr. Stevenson, it has been well said, plays upon words as if they were a musical instrument. His description of the old beggar in Across the Plains fits himself like a glove: 'What took him was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a

phrase; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language.' The artfulness of his diction is something to marvel at; the language grows plastic at his touch; he moulds it to his liking. So severely fastidious is his taste, that you may search his books from cover to cover without lighting upon a single slovenly or slipshod phrase. He is the first of the literary exquisites, the Keats of English prose; hackneyed forms of speech he shuns as he would the pestilence; with him distinction is a matter of course. This sedulous avoidance of the commonplace has of course its dangers. A writer who is never content to say things as other people say them, must sometimes pay the penalty by saying them worse; his style is apt to degenerate into mannerism. Mannerisms Mr. Stevenson no doubt has; in particular, he is rather too fond of French idioms; but nine times out of ten he fairly hits the bull's-eye. On his own confession, we can hardly grant him the praise of originality; he has borrowed much from Elizabethan writers, a fact which explains the somewhat archaic cast of his diction. The grand style he does not pretend to. In place of the flushed and magnificent rhetoric of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, he gives us a richly-wrought mosaic of dainty words and

phrases. Occasionally he affects a somewhat mincing gait; he is overmuch concerned to cut his capers and play his pretty tricks when we should prefer to see him break into a downright gallop. As an example of his style at its best, I quote a very beautiful and very touching passage on Scotland and Edinburgh. Mark the fine

felicity of phrase, and the melodious cadence of the evolution :

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There is no special loveliness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendlylooking corn-lands; its quaint grey, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday and the winds squall and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out, "Oh why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods.... When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning.' 'The happiest lot on earth,' he proceeds, 'is to be born a Scotsman. You must pay for it in many ways,

as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and the Shorter Catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can learn, is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names endeared in verse and music cling nearer round our heart.'

But it is time to turn to Mr. Stevenson's romances. A nice sense for the subtleties of style is not perhaps very widely diffused, and it was a fortunate day for Mr. Stevenson when it occurred to him to enter into competition with the purveyors of books for boys. of books for boys. Treasure Island, the first-fruit of this resolve, is in its way a classic. There should be nothing so much a man's business as his amusements,' says Mr. Stevenson; and certainly he at any rate is always dead in earnest in his play. The narrative is set down with so convincing an air of reality that it almost imposes on our senses. If Mr. Hardy often gives us the romance of realism, Mr. Stevenson succeeds admirably in giving us the realism of romance. Nor is the interest of Treasure Island solely that of sensational incident. The characters are graphically presented with

true dramatic genius. Who that has read the book can forget John Silver, that smooth-spoken and plausible villain? There is a curious pathetic touch in the marooned sailor who dreamt of 'cheese-toasted chiefly-and I awoke, and here I were.' And that eerie tapping of the blind man's stick along the frosty road long haunts the reader's memory.

Kidnapped takes even higher rank as a story. The fight in the round-house, the flight across the moor, the quarrel on the heather, are all in Mr. Stevenson's happiest manner. But the triumph of the book is Alan Breck, a creation worthy of the hand of Scott himself. Alan's dash and gallantry are irresistible, and we smile indulgently at his unconscionable vanity. Mr. Stevenson has committed a crime past forgiveness in making Alan play second fiddle to Mr. David Balfour of Shaws in the sequel to Kidnapped, published the other day. 'It is the lot of sequels to disappoint,' says Mr. Stevenson, and Catriona is hardly an exception to the rule. The story drags at the outset; Mr. Stevenson seems to lose himself in the wilderness of the Appin murder. We are not so much interested as he seems to be in the ins and outs of that case, and the story of legal chicanery and finesse, artfully as it is told, is pale and thin after the breadth and daring of