Of his writings the list is long and varied, and forms a goodly
heritage. Like himself, they are compounded of many parts, for he
was essayist, poet, novelist, traveller, moralist, biographer, and
historian, and a Master of his Tools at all. Beside his own books,
through many of which we may make his intimate acquaintance, his
letters, and others telling the story of his life, form many
volumes. Stevenson advised every one to read often, not only the
Waverley Novels, but the biography of good Sir Walter. "His life,"
he affirmed, "was perhaps more unique than his work," and that
remark applies to R. L. S. himself, as well as to his great
predecessor. Having burned his immature efforts when he was
following his own "private determination to be an author," when
ostensibly studying engineering, there are but two pamphlets,
printed in his boyhood, which are not written when he had acquired
his finished style. Louis' last creation, Weir of Hermiston, he
himself thought was his master-piece, and he was always his own
surest and severest critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he
modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate
days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a
Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance
of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as
Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which,
unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an artificer Louis had
become.

And what manner of man to the outward eye was this gypsily-inclined
descendant of square-headed Scottish engineers? With his dark eyes
looking as if they had drunk in the sunshine in some southern land,
his uncut hair, his odd, shabby clothes clinging to his attenuated