And Araby's or Eden's bowers
Were barren as this moorland hill," -


wrote Scott, in an hour of malady and depression. But this was not
the spirit of "Ordered South": the younger soul rose against the
tyranny of the body; and that familiar glamour which, in illness,
robs Tintoretto of his glow, did not spoil the midland sea to Mr.
Stevenson. His gallant and cheery stoicism were already with him;
and so perfect, if a trifle overstudied, was his style, that one
already foresaw a new and charming essayist.

But none of those early works, nor the delightful book on Edinburgh,
prophesied of the story teller. Mr. Stevenson's first published
tales, the "New Arabian Nights," originally appeared in a quaintly
edited weekly paper, which nobody read, or nobody but the writers in
its columns. They welcomed the strange romances with rejoicings:
but perhaps there was only one of them who foresaw that Mr.
Stevenson's forte was to be fiction, not essay writing; that he was
to appeal with success to the large public, and not to the tiny
circle who surround the essayist. It did not seem likely that our
incalculable public would make themselves at home in those fantastic
purlieus which Mr. Stevenson's fancy discovered near the Strand.
The impossible Young Man with the Cream Tarts, the ghastly revels of
the Suicide Club, the Oriental caprices of the Hansom Cabs--who
could foresee that the public would taste them! It is true that Mr.
Stevenson's imagination made the President of the Club, and the
cowardly member, Mr. Malthus, as real as they were terrible. His
romance always goes hand in hand with reality; and Mr. Malthus is as
much an actual man of skin and bone, as Silas Lapham is a man of