e poet can hear and see them.

His style, too--strong and virile as it is in his tales--attains, one
almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both
grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted
to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no
exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure
which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a
volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into
it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of
refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to
give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from
the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of
the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy
thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.

In his _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_, published, in one volume,
by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his
father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of
his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally
appeared in the _New Quarterly_, _Macmillan_, and _Cornhill_. The essays
deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of
Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable
reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr
Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a
later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had
so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.

To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid
presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting
phase of the character of the great Reformer--who so enjoyed
brow-beating Queen Mary--that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox
as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing
letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears
with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these
friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the
Reformer as to the ladies.

Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back
the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to
banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy