d in one--to live by stratagems, disguises, and false
names, in an atmosphere of midnight and mystery so thick that you
could cut it with a knife--was really, I believe, more dear to him
than his meals, though he was a great trencher-man and something of a
glutton besides. For myself, as the peg by which all this romantic
business hung, I was simply idolized from that moment; and he would
rather have sacrificed his hand than surrendered the privilege of
serving me.'

One can believe that Stevenson was a boy with tastes and ambitions
like Rowley. But for that matter Rowley stands for universal
boy-nature.

Criticism of _St. Ives_ becomes both easy and difficult by reason of
the fact that we know so much about the book from the author's point
of view. He wrote it in trying circumstances, and never completed it;
the last six chapters are from the pen of a practiced story-teller,
who follows the author's known scheme of events. Stevenson was almost
too severe in his comment upon his book. He says of _St. Ives_:--

'It is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well
or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the
happenings very good in themselves, I believe, but none of them
_bildende_, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as
they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics, and
all out of drawing. Here and there, I think, it is well written; and
here and there it's not.... If it has a merit to it, I should say it
was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me
to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all
through. 'Tis my most prosaic book.'

One must remember that this is epistolary self-criticism, and that it
is hardly to be looked upon in the nature of an 'advance notice.'
Still more confidential and epistolary is the humorous and reckless
affirmation that _St. Ives_ is 'a rudderless hulk.' 'It's a pagoda,'
says Stevenson in a letter dated September, 1894, 'and you can just
feel--or I can feel--that it might have been a pleasant story if it
had only been blessed at baptism.'

He had to rewrite portions of it in consequence of having received
what Dr. Johnson would have called 'a large accession of new ideas.'
The ideas were historical. The first five chapters describe the
experiences of French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle. St. Ives
was the only 'gentleman' among them, the only man with ancestors an