how vivid are his memories of his own infancy. This retention of
childish recollections he shares, no doubt, with other people of
genius: for example, with George Sand, whose legend of her own
infancy is much more entertaining, and perhaps will endure longer,
than her novels. Her youth, like Scott's and like Mr. Stevenson's,
was passed all in fantasy: in playing at being some one else, in
the invention of imaginary characters, who were living to her, in
the fabrication of endless unwritten romances. Many persons, who do
not astonish the world by their genius, have lived thus in their
earliest youth. But, at a given moment, the fancy dies out of them:
this often befalls imaginative boys in their first year at school.
"Many are called, few chosen"; but it may be said with probable
truth, that there has never been a man of genius in letters, whose
boyhood was not thus fantastic, "an isle of dreams." We know how
Scott and De Quincey inhabited airy castles; and Gillies tells us,
though Lockhart does not, that Scott, in manhood, was occasionally
so lost in thought, that he knew not where he was nor what he was
doing.

The peculiarity of Mr. Stevenson is not only to have been a
fantastic child, and to retain, in maturity, that fantasy ripened
into imagination: he has also kept up the habit of dramatising
everything, of playing, half consciously, many parts, of making the
world "an unsubstantial fairy place." This turn of mind it is that
causes his work occasionally to seem somewhat freakish. Thus, in
the fogs and horrors of London, he plays at being an Arabian tale-
teller, and his "New Arabian Nights" are a new kind of romanticism--
Oriental, freakish, like the work of a changeling. Indeed, this
curious genius, springing from a family of Scottish engineers,
resembles nothing so much as one of the fairy children, whom the