out when occasion arose.

But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a
description of his use of individual words or his memory of
individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and
emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so
seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great
debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is
a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will
hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them,
shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for
his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose
writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the
golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!'
says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern
mechanique after them.' And he quotes a passage from Harrington's
OCEANA:


'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One
Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her
own hand, is herself King People.'


It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson
learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be
particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain
Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable LIVES OF PIRATES
AND HIGHWAYMEN. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few
modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style.