and in face of two of his
doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth. This
is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone
which can exult in its power of accumulating shadows and dwelling on the
dark side--it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its
brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own
excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine--hugging to its
heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring
up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined
horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own
relief--rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable,
even were it possible. _The Master of Ballantrae_ indeed marks the
crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure
passion--the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which
yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of
their tendency to pass into this other and apparently opposite. But
here, too, there is nothing single or separate. The device of piracy,
etc., at close of _Ballantrae_, is one of the poorest expedients for
relief in all fiction.

Will in _Will o' the Mill_ presents another. When at the last moment he
decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then
rather incontinent philosophy--which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act
on--spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a
romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace
inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he
were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr
Gwynn thus writing:

"The love scenes in _Weir of Hermiston_ are almost unsurpassable; but
the central interest of the story lies elsewhere--in the relations
between father and son. Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in
the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability
to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no
longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life. Before
this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men
where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled
family group, the result was what we see in _The Master of
Ballantrae_."

In a word, between this work and _Weir of