istic intelligence thus keenly conscious
of its own purpose and watchful of its own working.

"Once more, it may be questioned whether, among the many varieties of
work which Stevenson has left, all distinguished by a grace and
precision of workmanship which are the rarest qualities in English art,
there are any which can be pointed to as absolute masterpieces, such as
the future cannot be expected to let die. Let the future decide. What is
certain is that posterity must either be very well or very ill occupied
if it can consent to give up so much sound entertainment, and better
than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries. In the
meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic,
Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of
English prose; scarcely surpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity
with suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence
and the well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting
to words the vital quality of things, and making them convey the
precise--sometimes, let it be granted, the too curiously
precise--expression of the very shade and colour of the thought,
feeling, or vision in his mind. He stands, moreover, as the writer who,
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has handled with the most
of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established
literary forms--the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels
sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and
modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure,
memoirs--nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish,
and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be
forgotten. To some of these forms Stevenson gave quite new life; through
all alike he expressed vividly an extremely personal way of seeing and
being, a sense of nature and romance, of the aspects of human existence
and problems of human conduct, which was essentially his own. And in so
doing he contrived to make friends and even lovers of his readers. Those
whom he attracts at all (and there is no writer who attracts every one)
are drawn to him over and over again, finding familiarity not lessen but
increase the charm of his work, and desiring ever closer intimacy with
the spirit and personality which they divine behind it.

"As to the fitting scale, then, on which to treat the memory of a man
who fills five