ate the various cords of love, admiration, and gratitude which
bind us to this man. He had a multitude of friends. He appealed to a
wider audience than he knew. He himself said that he was read by
journalists, by his fellow novelists, and by boys. Envious admiration
might prompt a less successful writer to exclaim, 'Well, isn't that
enough?' No, for to be truly blest one must have women among one's
readers. And there are elect ladies not a few who know Stevenson's
novels; yet it is a question whether he has reached the great mass of
female novel-readers. Certainly he is not well known in that circle of
fashionable maidens and young matrons which justly prides itself upon
an acquaintance with Van Bibber. And we can hardly think he is a
familiar name to that vast and not fashionable constituency which
battens upon the romances of Marie Corelli under the impression that
it is perusing literature, while he offers no comfort whatever to that
type of reader who prefers that a novel shall be filled with hard
thinking, with social riddles, theological problems, and 'sexual
theorems.' Stevenson was happy with his journalists and boys. Among
all modern British men of letters he was in many ways the most highly
blest; and his career was entirely picturesque and interesting. Other
men have been more talked about, but the one thing which he did not
lack was discriminating praise from those who sit in high critical
places.

He was prosperous, too, though not grossly prosperous. It is no new
fact that the sales of his books were small in proportion to the
magnitude of his contemporary fame. People praised him tremendously,
but paid their dollars for entertainment of another quality than that
supplied by his fine gifts. _An Inland Voyage_ has never been as
popular as _Three Men in a Boat_, nor _Treasure Island_ and
_Kidnapped_ as _King Solomon's Mines_; while _The Black Arrow_, which
Mr. Lang does not like, and Professor Saintsbury insists is 'a
wonderfully good story,' has not met a wide public favor at all.
_Travels with a Donkey_, which came out in 1879, had only reached its
sixth English edition in 1887. Perhaps that is good for a book so
entirely virtuous in a literary way, but it was not a success to keep
a man awake nights.

We have been told that it is wrong to admire _Jekyll and Hyde_, that
the story is 'coarse,' an 'outrage upon the grand allegories of the
same motive,' and several other things; nay, it is even hinted that