o are absolutely unique
in literature. The blind pirate in his malevolent fury is a creature
that chills the heart, while Silver is a cheerful villain who murders
with a smile. In _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ Stevenson has aroused that
sense of mystery and horror which springs from the spectacle of the
domination of an evil spirit over a nature essentially kind and good.

Stevenson came of a race of Scotch men of affairs. His grandfather was
the most distinguished lighthouse builder of his day and his father
gained prominence in the same work that demands the highest
engineering skill with great executive capacity. Stevenson himself
would have been an explorer or a soldier of fortune had he been born
with the physical strength to fit his mental endowments. His childhood
was so full of sickness that it reads like a hospital report. His life
was probably preserved by the assiduous care and rare devotion of an
old Scotch nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom he has immortalized in his
letters and in his _A Child's Garden of Verse_. The sickly boy was an
eager reader of everything that fell in his way in romance and
poetry. Later he devoted himself to systematic training of his powers
of observation and his great capacity for expressing his thoughts.

His youth was spent in migrations to the south in winter and in
efforts to thrive in Scotland's dour climate in the summer. His school
training was fitful and brief, but from the age of ten the boy had
been training himself in the field which he felt was to be his own.
His first literary work was essays and descriptive sketches for the
magazines. Then came short stories in which he revealed great
capacity. Recognition came very slowly. He was comparatively unknown
after he had produced such charming work as _An Inland Voyage_ and
_Travels With a Donkey_, not to mention the _New Arabian Nights_.
Popularity came with _Treasure Island_, written as a story for boys,
and the one work of Stevenson's in which his creative imagination does
not flag toward the end; but fame came only after the writing of _The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_--the most remarkable story of
a dual personality produced in the last century. After this he wrote a
long succession of stories, not one of which can be called a
masterpiece because of the author's inability to finish his novels as
he planned them. Lack of patience or want of sustained creative power
invariably made him cut short his novels or end t