y
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
_Here he lies where he longed to be_,
_Home is the sailor_, _home from the sea_,
_And the hunter home from the hill_.'

This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour and
music of a soldier's funeral.

The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular
combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accident
has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous
followers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted to
the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared
little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony
style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or
nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid
romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase,
'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly
and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day.
But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set
himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty
of style.

I. STYLE.--Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature,'
unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it
first. A poet is born, not made,--so is every man,--but he is born raw.
Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the
art of writing,

'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.'

Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education,
are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature--they
are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind. All writing is a kind of
word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the
diverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select them
judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing,
all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking,
our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a
feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed
from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up
from the rags in the street. We