ry
out promptly, and the result appeared under the title _Vailima Letters_
in the autumn following his death (1895). Lack of leisure delayed the
execution of the remaining part. For one thing, the body of
correspondence which came in from various quarters turned out much
larger than had been anticipated. He did not love writing letters, and
will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as
one "essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary." That
he was a bad correspondent had come to be an accepted view among his
friends; but in truth it was only during one period of his life that he
at all deserved such a reproach.[1] At other times, as became apparent
after his death, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in
letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and his occupations.
It was indeed he and not his friends, as will abundantly appear in the
course of these volumes, who oftenest had cause to complain of answers
neglected or delayed. His letters, it is true, were often the most
informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit
which is the despair of editors: but after his own whim and fashion he
wrote a vast number, so that the work of sifting, copying, and arranging
was long and laborious. It was not until the autumn of 1899 that the
_Letters to his Family and Friends_ were ready for publication, and in
the meantime the task of writing the _Life_ had been taken over by his
cousin and my friend, Mr. Graham Balfour, who completed it two years
later.

"In considering the scale and plan on which my friend's instruction
should be carried out" (I quote, with the change of a word or two, from
my Introduction of 1899), "it seemed necessary to take into account, not
his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which he seemed
likely to take ultimately in the world's regard. The four or five years
following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are
generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is
going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson's name
seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary
reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another
sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales
and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose
beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a
greater