searched for the story in his reprinted works, I cannot think of it without seeing the dead body lying in a certain position on the dining-room floor. The remainder of the verse cannot in fairness (even to an author of thirteen) be given, as there are in the final line two qualifying epithets to one noun, I have only so far come upon two both of which have been struck out as specimens of Stevenson's literary work unsatisfactory by the already fastidious at that early age- one a rhyming self-critic. The dénouement is the death letter he wrote in reply to one I had of the young Baron of Manaheit, in the sent him embodying the regrets of his attempt to defy prophecy, and is deschoolmates at his absence in Torquay, scribed with a certain promise of Steand the other, an imperfect and much-venson's force and dramatic power: corrected-and-altered draft of a roman- He gasped, he struggled, then, with hands tic ballad of the "Baron of Manaheit." Of the (intentional) doggerel of the letter, the following lines are an amusing specimen, and are not without a hint of that playful humor which became one of his finest and most fascinating qualities: E'er since I left I've pined in melancholly, Its rocks and sea Have witnessed my folly. That all the day I weep and pine in grief, I say again The greek for "stop the thief!" I intentionally preserve the slip in spelling and the lacking capital as characteristic of schoolboy haste and carelessness. I do not now remember what is the Greek for "Stop the thief!" but have no doubt it was a fine, mouthfilling phrase with probably an exhilarating suggestion of profanity. It may indeed encourage the juvenile literary aspirant to know that precocity in the matter of correct spelling is evidently not a sine quâ non of ultimate success in letters. The ballad was probably written for the Jack o' Lantern, but 'twas hardly in a state for publication, even there, in spite of the amount of "elbow grease " to which it has obviously been subjected. It opens characteristically with a description of a haunted house: The moon shone down from the black arch of night, on high, Gave one loud shriek and from his sad dle dropped. But there is no sign in these early attempts of anything really premature or precocious, and nothing can be truer, in spite of his early bent towards letters, than that his success was the fruit, as he himself alleges, of persistent industry and indefatigable perseverance, and when we consider that all this was accomplished in the face of much discountenance and opposition, and despite all the drawbacks of physical weakness and almost continuous delicacy and ill-health, Stevenson's achievement in literature must seem nothing short of heroic. And when we remember that he died hard at work, too hard I fear, in the harness he had so resolutely buckled on, we may well declare that the Carlyle of the future will not have far to seek for a "Hero as Man of Letters." - he to make a valiant, but vain, attempt to follow his father's profession, and I to proceed to the arts classes of Edinburgh University; and so it came about that he followed me to the university some three years later, and we thus belonged to quite different generations of undergraduate life and moved But I fancy we in different sets. And showed a house close by the public by a crisis in my own inner history, way. chiefly induced, I believe, by a perusal of Pascal's "Pensées," which resulted in a period of religious depression - as A renewal of our intercourse came I regard it now which must have about rather curiously, from his inmade me poor company for any one, structing his publishers, Messrs. Chatto but most of all for the bright, elastic & Windus, to send me a copy of the hedonist, the truant, life-loving stu- volume entitled "Ballads," a form of dent, diligent in all studies but those compliment he had never before paid prescribed for him. So there appears me. This naturally led to my writing to me at this time a yawning gap to him, and this to a project that I in our intercourse which must have should visit him in Samoa; a project, extended over several years, further alas! never, to my infinite regret, caraccounted for by the fact that while he ried out, the fault being my own, as was at Edinburgh University I was was the misfortune. But it led to my mainly in Cambridge. Then he had, in receiving letters from him, which are those days, also to take swallow-flights naturally very precious possessions now. southward in search of warmth and They are in the old vein of frank sunshine. But somehow, I recollect not friendship, disengaged and manly, but how, our friendship became renewed, breathing of that fine camaraderie of and on some bright day when the Edin- which he and Whitman, of all modburgh climate was gracious for a time erns, most possessed the secret. I he would pounce on me and carry me had spoken warmly of the "Ballads,” off to some snug, wind-sheltered seat which the public, it seems, would have in the Princess Street Gardens, and in none of, especially the "Song of Rapleasant fraternal converse we would hero," which I regard as his highest report ourselves to each other and ex- achievement in verse, and he writes: change mental electricities, no doubt largely to my profit. When we had, so to speak, squared our mental accounts, or my duties recalled me, we would part, probably for months, till his cometary track again came into conjunction with my prosaic orbit, and he pounced on me for another day of reckoning. But gradually as his wanderings extended and his absences from Scotland grew in duration, his visits became more angelic in frequency; the last IAB C. remember was after his marriage, and cannot understand antiquity; he is sunk I saw Mrs. Stevenson at a little dis-over the ears in Roman civilization; and a tance, but was not introduced to her. But I think I may say this curious fragmentary friendship maintained a wonderful warmth, not only on my part but on his. My love and admiration were doubtless fed continually by his books, and especially his essays, in which I always felt the true Stevenson, and which brought to me so completely his presence, his voice and smile, that my friend seemed ever at my elbow, ready to discourse in his best manner, his happiest vein. So even when the news of his death came, I did not feel it as a remote event, but rather as though a comrade in arms were shot down by one's side. They [the "Ballads"] failed to entertain I set much account by my verses, which a coy public, at which I wondered, not that are the verses of Prosator; but I do know how to tell a yarn, and two of the yarns are great. 66 Rahero" is for its length a perfect folk-tale; savage and yet fine, full of tail-foremost morality, ancient as the granite rocks; if the historian, not to say the politician, could get that yarn into his head, he would have learned some of his But the average man at home tale like that of "Rahero" falls on his ears inarticulate. The Spectator said there was no psychology in it; that interested me much; my grandmother (as I used to call that able paper, and an able paper it is, and a fair one) cannot so much as observe the existence of savage psychology when it is put before it. I am at bottom a psychologist, and ashamed of it; the tale seized me one-third because of its picturesque features, two-thirds because of its astonishing psychology, and the Spectator says there's none. island work, exulting in the knowledge of I am going on with a lot of a new world, "a new created world" and new men; and I am sure my income will DECLINE and FALL off; for the effort of comprehension is death to the intelligent public, and sickness to the dull. Everything he here says, points to a | was utterly repellent, and it does not remarkably sane and true estimate of require the record of his converse with his own powers, and I do not think I the Trappists to apprise us that in a ever met or read of a man of letters or clime whose religion is more indulgent genius of any kind more genuinely to human frailties and less divorced modest than Stevenson. His ideal was from the beautiful, his life might have high, and he seldom altogether pleased taken on more color of piety in the himself; so he was apt rather to dis-ordinary sense. parage too much those of his efforts In spite of the childish piety on which failed of his severe standard of which he seems to me to plume himachievement. He put me off reading self rather unnecessarily, the religious one of his volumes for years, because world, as he found it, revolted him by he described it as composed of pot- its harshness and moral pedantry, boilers or some such phrase. When I which too often but skimmed over came to read it I saw well enough what characters full of dishonesty, selfishmade him utter this libel on himself. ness, and even impurity. But his naThe work was not of his best, perhaps ture was not exactly of the religious somewhat tentative; but there were type; he was tender rather than revtouches of the master of story-telling erent, sympathetic and indulgent -a charm and force of style he could rather than austerely virtuous; the not divest himself of. As a rule he human was more to him than the was, in a degree very rare among divine. Yet he was ever on the road artistic natures, more severe and sternly to true piety by the route indicated in just to his own work than any of his St. John's epistles: the love of his critics; indeed, he sometimes treated brother; but his code is not a little his own offspring with a truculent heathen. Like Heine, he is a Hellenseverity worthy of a Roman father, or ist, not a Hebraist, more anxious and of his favorite, Lord Braxfield. Few appreciative of graciousness and grace men, I am convinced, have on any of bearing and conduct than of strict score treated themselves to more brutal conformity to set rules of virtue or frankness. Still, when he had done morals. Of all rule and convention, what he thought was good work, he indeed, he was the sworn foe; virtue was minded to stick loyally by it, and itself only charms him when growing valiantly maintain his position, whether wild. Of the drudgery of labor at set against the slights of a fickle, dull-times and places, of the compliance scented public, or the onslaught of with civilized routine and fashion, he critics. was fully as incapable as Hottentot or Red Indian. He loved to plunge into vagrancy, into the lower strata of society, into the company of the huddled and hustled emigrant, or the companionship of primitive and savage peoples; anywhere, indeed, where he could purge himself of that middleclass respectability that so stank in his nostrils. When we come to judge of Stevenson's career, and especially his conduct of life, and more particularly when the fascinating autography we find in his books is supplemented by a biography indited by loving and sympathetic hands (as we hope it will be), we must always bear in mind the peculiarity of his ethical standards. He had early revolted against the grim rule of min- He had a true child's horror of being gled Calvinism and Puritanism, behind put into fine clothes, in which one which (in spite of the heroic purity of must "sit still and be good." I fancy many) lurks, as behind a grim mask, he modestly disclaimed the pretension much unlovely evil in Scottish char- to be good in the ordinary acceptation; To his supple, artistic, and yet he has his own rather exacting perhaps somewhat Gallicized nature, standards for human action. He is with its unconquerable Bohemianism, austere with Robert Burns, and when the grim, granite face of Scottish piety he writes of Villon, we feel he is suffo acter. cating with moral nausea. Neither of marble selfishness of the one, nor the them reaches his notion of manly cou- peevish bitterness of the other. He duct. He cannot forgive the village made a brave fight to live, on the Don Juan that Scotland delights to whole, the true and the beautiful, an honor as though he had been a saint; | ideal in its way more exacting than he cannot stomach the sordid envy or any. But the man, like his style, is the vile complacences of Villon. Yet unique. In his life and his books one another kind of bad character he can be is often reminded of the models by indulgent enough to is his own "Mas- which he shaped his action or his ter of Ballantrae," perhaps the most style, yet the result is pure Stevenson. unmitigated and accomplished scoundrel in fiction, and he leaves him with the tragic honors of the story, while the poor, worthy, long-suffering brother sinks into a despicable sot. His life was perhaps more unique than his work. A life-long invalid, braving innumerable trials, hardships, and perils, before which the hardiest might have quailed; an Edinburghbred lad without reverence for caste or the religion of the tall hat, and yet more surprising, a member of the Scottish bar travelling in the steerage of an emigrant ship, and at times not over particular as to his own linen. A professed wanderer and Bohemian, with no pretensions to regular industry, and yet, when we consider his short life and the high quality of much of his work, one of the most prolific writers of his age. Beset from his childhood with disease, and menaced by death, sorely tempted (as he hints to me in a letter) to give way to evil courses, and tread the fatal path genius has so often trodden; passing through painful struggle with his father as to his career; driven hither and thither in search of the possibility of living; exiled from every intellectual centre, and yet exercising his splendid powers unweariedly, indefatigably, to the end! But every experience, however painful, he turned to gain; from every enemy was wrested some weapon for use; as light-heartedly as a little child gathers a posy in a graveyard, he fearlessly reaped a harvest in the very "valley of the Stevenson's moral judgments were guided more by what I call the poetic or absolute ethic, than by that practical ethic which society, rather than the best impulses of our nature, imposes. Now in the poetic scale of virtues a high place, if not the highest, is always allotted to courage, and that absolutely and independently of the cause in which it is displayed. Courage as courage is morally beautiful, however inconvenient it may be to the authorities. Hence the highwayman, the brigand, and the buccaneer always appeal to us, however dark their deeds may be; but let them flinch or play the poltroon, and we are done with them. Love, again, is a true poet's virtue, and wherever we are convinced that the love is genuine, we are all, I fear, very willing to lend a hand in pitching the Decalogue overboard. So we might proceed to make a list of these romantic and poetic virtues and their more prosaic counterparts, as generosity and prudence, charity and circumspection, impulsiveness and caution, passion and the wisdom that is "aye sae cauld," and we should find Stevenson leaning to the former rather than the latter.shadow." But this is perhaps more à propos of his art than his life. I have no doubt, both from what he 'himself said to me and from what I know of his character, that he modelled his conduct as much after that of Goethe, as of any predecessor in letters. He had a touch of that paganism which Goethe and Heine exemplified, but he allowed himself neither the His one fear was that of "dying at the top," and in a letter dated June 30, 1894, he said in words that ring now like prophecy, "If I could die just" now, or in say half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce, and parties to shy bricks at me; and it now begins to look as if I should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten." | until two years afterwards, when he He even moots the question as to was entered in the books as plebis filius. whether he should not have taken his Wood (Ath. Oxon.) tells us that "he father's way and been an engineer, was always averse to the crabbed studwith literature for an "amusement." ies of logic and philosophy. For so it But he adds, "I have pulled it off of course; I have won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts, but how long will it last?" Too well we know that, and that his own prayer was too literally fulfilled. That in the full tide of literary activity, so successful that, as he wrote, "it frightens me," long-hesitating death laid him suddenly low, with his fame, in spite of all his misgivings, standing at high-water mark, loved by his thousands of readers as few have been loved, to be deplored and lamented as but few have been lamented or deplored. H. BELLYSE BAILDON. was, that his genius being bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (its pitfalls had given him a wreath of his own, bays without snatching or struggling), did in a manner neglect academical studies, yet not so much but that he took degrees in arts, that of master being completed in 1575; at which time he was esteemed at the university a noted wit, and afterwards was in the court of Queen Elizabeth, where he was also reputed a rare poet, witty, comical, and facetious." He took the degree of B.A. in April, 1573, and that of M.A. two years afterwards. But for some reason unknown he afterwards left Oxford and removed to Cambridge, whence he went to court. There is preserved among the LansFrom The Gentleman's Magazine. downe manuscripts in the British MuJOHN LYLY AND HIS "EUPHUES." seum a beautifully written Latin letter, WHEN Sir Walter Scott, in the char- dated 1574, from Lyly to Lord Burleigh, acter of Sir Piercie Shafton, attempted in which the young scholar solicits the the portrait of an Euphuist after the patronage of the great statesman. And manuer of John Lyly's once famous not in vain, for in "Euphues and his hero, few persons knew anything about England" Lyly writes: "This noble "Euphues' Anatomie of Wit" or its man [Burleigh] I found so ready, being author, for when "The Monastery" but a stranger, to do me good, that was written, Elizabethan literature, neither I ought to forget him, neither though Charles Lamb had directed at- cease to pray for him." It would aptention to its treasures in his "Speci- pear that he was admitted to some mens" twelve years previously, was position of trust in Lord Burleigh's scarcely read by any one except him- household, but from a letter addressed self and Coleridge. In a late edition of to his patron, preserved in the Laushis romance Scott was fain to confess downe manuscripts, it seems that in that his attempt had proved a failure. | 1582 he fell under some suspicion, and It is probable that the great novelist was dismissed in disgrace. The earhad never read "Euphues," and drew nest and passionate tone in which he his knight from Jonson's and Shake- entreats that a full inquiry shall be speare's caricatures instead of from the instituted justifies the conclusion that original. Charles Kingsley, in "West- the accusation was a false one. ward Ho!" falls foul of Sir Piercie, "God is my witness," he writes, and points out that he is an anachro-" before whom I speak, and before nism belonging to the later and worst whom for my speech I shall answer, days of the euphuistic craze. that all my thoughts concerning my The author of "The Anatomie of lord have been ever reverent and Wit," it would seem, was born in the almost religious. How I have dealt Weald of Kent, about the year 1553 or God knoweth and my lady can conjec1554, and entered Magdalen College, ture, so faithfully, as I am unspotted Oxford, in 1569, but did not matriculate for dishonesty, as a suckling from LIVING AGE. VOL. VI. 275 |