es coenaeque deum_ I was never a partaker. In many topics,
such as angling, golf, cricket, whereon I am willingly diffuse, Mr.
Stevenson took no interest. He was very fond of boating and sailing in
every kind; he hazarded his health by long expeditions among the fairy
isles of ocean, but he "was not a British sportsman," though for his
measure of strength a good pedestrian, a friend of the open air, and of
all who live and toil therein.

As to his literary likings, they appear in his own confessions. He
revelled in Dickens, but, about Thackeray--well, I would rather have
talked to somebody else! To my amazement, he was of those (I think) who
find Thackeray "cynical." "He takes you into a garden, and then pelts
you with"--horrid things! Mr. Stevenson, on the other hand, had a free
admiration of Mr. George Meredith. He did not so easily forgive the
_longueus_ and lazinesses of Scott, as a Scot should do. He read French
much; Greek only in translations.

Literature was, of course, his first love, but he was actually an
advocate at the Scottish Bar, and, as such, had his name on a brazen door-
plate. Once he was a competitor for a Chair of Modern History in
Edinburgh University; he knew the romantic side of Scottish history very
well. In his novel, "Catriona," the character of James Mohr Macgregor is
wonderfully divined. Once I read some unpublished letters of Catriona's
unworthy father, written when he was selling himself as a spy (and lying
as he spied) to the Hanoverian usurper. Mr. Stevenson might have written
these letters for James Mohr; they might be extracts from "Catriona."

In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a forgotten romance of
Prince Charles's hidden years, and longed that Mr. Stevenson should
retell it. There was a treasure, an authentic treasure; there were real
spies, a real assassin; a real, or reported, rescue of a lovely girl from
a fire at Strasbourg, by the Prince. The tale was to begin _sur le pont
d'Avignon_: a young Scotch exile watching the Rhone, thinking how much of
it he could cover with a salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or Beauly. To
him enter another shady tramping exile, Blairthwaite, a murderer. And so
it was to run on, as the author's fancy might lead him, with Alan Breck
and the Master for characters. At last, in unpublished MSS. I found an
actual Master of Ballantrae, a Highland chief--noble, majestically
handsome--and a paid spy of England! All these paper