two minutes the nice calculations
of months. Your logic, your taste, your palpitating sense of style,
your exquisite ear for rhythm and cadence--what do these avail against
the man who goes straight to Stationers' Hall or the Parish Register?

"Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail,"

as Mr. Kipling sings. The answer, of course, is that the beauty of
reasoning upon internal evidence lies in the process rather than the
results. You spend a month in studying a poet, and draw some
conclusion which is entirely wrong: within a week you are set right by
some fellow with a Parish Register. Well, but meanwhile you have been
reading poetry, and he has not. Only the uninstructed judge criticism
by its results alone.

If, then, after studying Messrs. Stevenson and Osbourne's _The
Ebb-Tide_ (London: Heinemann) I hazard a guess or two upon its
authorship; and if somebody take it into his head to write out to
Samoa and thereby elicit the information that my guesses are entirely
wrong--why then we shall have been performing each of us his proper
function in life; and there's an end of the matter.

Let me begin though--after reading a number of reviews of the
book--by offering my sympathy to Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Very possibly he
does not want it. I guess him to be a gentleman of uncommonly cheerful
heart. I hope so, at any rate: for it were sad to think that
indignation had clouded even for a minute the gay spirit that gave us
_The Wrong Box_--surely the funniest book written in the last ten
years. But he has been most shamefully served. Writing with him, Mr.
Stevenson has given us _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb-Tide_. Faults
may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in
the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are
splendid tales: nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a
singular and original pattern. Yet no reviewer praises them on their
own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in
relation to Mr. Stevenson's previous work, and the reviewers
concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr.
Stevenson's development--that he is not continuing as the public
expected him to continue.

Now there are a number of esteemed novelists about the land who earn
comfortable incomes by doing just what the public expects of them. But
of Mr. Stevenson's genius--always something wayward--freaks might have
bee