has seen and felt, neither more nor less than what he holds is true. Mr
Andrew Lang wrote an article in the _Morning Post_ of 16th December 1901,
under the title "Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled
his part in midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on
Stevenson.

"Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost
daily miss, as that character was displayed in circumstances unknown
to me, I think that I ought to speak of him as I found him. Perhaps
our sympathy was mainly intellectual. Constantly do those who knew
him desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him
the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or things
in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own by the
gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his appreciation. We may
say, as Scott said at the grave of John Ballantyne, that he has taken
with him half the sunlight out of our lives. That he was sympathetic
and interested in the work of others (which I understand has been
denied) I have reason to know. His work and mine lay far apart: mine,
I think, we never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him. But
in a fragmentary manuscript of his after his death I found the
unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness. Again, he once
wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine whom he had
never met. His remarks were ideally judicious, a model of serviceable
criticism. I found him chivalrous as an honest boy; brave, with an
indomitable gaiety of courage; on the point of honour, a Sydney or a
Bayard (so he seemed to me); that he was open-handed I have reason to
believe; he took life 'with a frolic welcome.' That he was
self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he was
fond of attitude (like his own brave admirals) he himself knew well,
and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his habit of
'playing at' things after the fashion of childhood. Genius is the
survival into maturity of the inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson
is not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more
than its inspiration. Other examples readily occur to the memory--in
one way Byron, in another Tennyson. None of us is perfect: I do not
want to erect an immaculate clay-cold image of a man, in marble or in
sugar-candy. B