with better reason than many have) thought himself doomed. Most of us
have gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown such
a wise and gay acceptance of the apparently inevitable? We parted; I
remember little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of
encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much more of
life than his senior will ever do. For he ran forth to embrace life like
a lover: _his_ motto was never Lucy Ashton's--

"Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."

Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford. I make no hand of
reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said, with one
exception, which is not going to be published. I heard of him, writing
essays in the _Portfolio_ and the _Cornhill_, those delightful views of
life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid, so wise, so exquisite,
which all should know. How we looked for "R. L. S." at the end of an
article, and how devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young
one!

About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received a
brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, in his
essay on his old college magazine, he called "Glasgow Brown." What his
real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never knew. G.
B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper. Would I contribute? G. B.
came to see me. Mr. Stevenson has described him, _not_ as I would have
described him: like Mr. Bill Sikes's dog, I have the Christian
peculiarity of not liking dogs "as are not of my breed." G. B.'s paper,
_London_, was to start next week. He had no writer of political leading
articles. Would I do a "leader"? But I was _not_ in favour of Lord