ontribute besides those few but precious documents
which appear in their places in the second volume of "Letters to Family
and Friends."

Albeit, in spite of every such blank, here is such richness as has not
been in any man's correspondence since Horace Walpole's--yet never, like
his, acidly-based, never razor-edged, never, for all Stevenson's Edinburgh
extraction, either west-endy or east-windy. Here in brief are two books,
solid, sane, packed with wit and kindliness and filled full of the very
height of living.

Not all of Stevenson is here--it seems to me, not even the greater part of
Stevenson. Considered from one point of view, there is more of the depths
of the real Stevenson in a single chapter of Miss Eve Simpson's
"Edinburgh Days," especially in the chapter entitled "Life at
Twenty-five," than in any of these 750 fair pages. But with such a friend
as Mr. Colvin this was inevitable. He has carried out that finest of the
maxims of amity, "Censure your friend in private, praise him in public!"
And, indeed, if ever man deserved to be praised it was Stevenson. So
generous was he, so ready to be pleased with other men's matters, so hard
to satisfy with his own, a child among children, a man among men, a king
among princes. Yet, all the same, anything of the nature of a play stirred
him to the shoe soles, down to that last tragic bowl of salad and bottle
of old Burgundy on the night before he died. He was a fairy prince and a
peasant boy in one, Aladdin with an old lamp under his arm always ready to
be rubbed, while outside his window Jack's beanstalk went clambering
heavenward a foot every five minutes.

All the same, it gives one a heartache--even those of us who knew him
least--to think that no more of these wide sheets close written and many
times folded will ever come to us through the post. And what the want must
be to those who knew him longer and better, to Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, Mr.
Henley, only they know.

For myself, I am grateful for every word set down here. It is all sweet,
and true, and gracious. The heaven seems kinder to the earth while we
read, and in the new portrait Tusitala's large dark eyes gleam at us from
beneath the penthouse of his brows with a gipsy-like and transitory
suggestion.

"The Sprite" some one called him. And it was a true word. For here he had
no continuing city. Doubtless, though, he lightens some Farther Lands with
his bright wit, and such ministering spirits as he may cro