ales of adventure and intrigue, out-of-door
life and old-time romance, and he recalled to every reader his boyhood
and the delights of his earliest reading. We had forgotten that novels
could be amusing.

Hence it is that the great public not only loves Stevenson as a writer,
but regards him with a certain personal gratitude. There was, moreover,
in everything he wrote an engaging humorous touch which made friends for
him everywhere, and excited an interest in his fragile and somewhat
elusive personality supplementary to the appreciation of his books as
literature. Toward the end of his life both he and the public
discovered this, and his railleries or sermons took on the form of
personal talk.

Beneath these matters lay the fact, known to all, that the man was
fighting a losing battle against mortal sickness, and that practically
the whole of his work was done under conditions which made any
productivity seem a miracle. The heroic invalid was seen through all his
books, still sitting before his desk or on his bed, turning out with
unabated courage, with increasing ability, volume after volume of
gayety, of boys' story-book, and of tragic romance.

There is enough in this record to explain the popularity, running at
times into hero-worship and at times into drawing-room fatuity, which
makes Stevenson and his work a fair subject for study. It is not
impossible that a man who met certain needs of the times so fully, and
whom large classes of people sprang forward to welcome, may in some
particulars give a clew to the age.

Any description of Stevenson's books is unnecessary. We have all read
them too recently to need a prompter. The high spirits and elfin humor
which play about and support every work justifies them all.

One of his books, The Child's Garden of Verses, is different in kind
from the rest. It has no prototype, and is by far the most original
thing that he did. The unsophisticated and gay little volume is a work
of the greatest value. Stevenson seems to have remembered the
impressions of his childhood with accuracy, and he has recorded them
without affectation, without sentimentality, without exaggeration. In
depicting children he draws from life. He is at home in the mysteries of
their play and in the inconsequent operations of their minds, in the
golden haze of impressions in which they live. The references to
children in his essays and books show the same understanding and
sympathy. There is more tha