of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a
serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was
in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is
something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something
irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular
to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in
Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all
the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of
the Rev. Dr. Hyde.


II. ROMANCE. - The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts
showered on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no
course of development; the most that can be done with it is to
preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is
of a piece with Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood
never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an
effort. In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines,
but it became conscious of its working. And the highest note of
these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of
his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the
embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or
attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' His
essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that
narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that
are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay
or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and
painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief
excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of
these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected