of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful;
the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and
described his emotions and aspirations. Something of the same
disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He
loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was
always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who,
like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived for an idea.' Even the low
and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he
climbs the mast to murder the hero of TREASURE ISLAND, breathes out
its soul in a creed:


' "For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good
and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going,
and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o'
goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't
bite; them's my views - Amen, so be it." '


John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an
eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of
wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His
unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner.
Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low
forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-
pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study
of Huish in THE EBB TIDE.

Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited
with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman