plot is apocryphal, and
who never appears again.

Treasure Island is a piece of astounding ingenuity, in which the manner
is taken from Robinson Crusoe, and the plot belongs to the era of the
detective story. The Treasure of Franchard is a French farce or light
comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a little old-fashioned, but
perfectly authentic. The tone, the _mise-en-scene_, the wit, the
character-drawing, the very language, are all so marvellously reproduced
from the French, that we almost see the footlights while we read it.

The Sieur de Maletroit's Door embodies the same idea as a well-known
French play in verse and in one act. The version of Stevenson is like an
exquisite water-color copy, almost as good as the original.

The Isle of Voices is the production of a man of genius. No one can too
much admire the legerdemain of the magician who could produce this
thing; for it is a story out of the Arabian Nights, told with a
perfection of mannerism, a reproduction of the English in which the
later translators of the Arabian Nights have seen fit to deal, a
simulation of the movement and detail of the Eastern stories which
fairly takes our breath away.

It is "ask and have" with this man. Like Mephistopheles in the
Raths-Keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an
instance in point. Any one familiar with Merimee's stories will smile at
the naivete with which Stevenson has taken the leading idea of Lokis,
and surrounded it with the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we have
"fables," moralities, and psychology, Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will
O' the Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say,
"Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip
company till curfew--aye, and by St. Mary till the Sun get up again." We
must have opera bouffe, as in Prince Otto; melodrama, as in The Pavilion
on the Links; the essay of almost biblical solemnity in the manner of
Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming humor in the style of Charles
Lamb, the essay of introspection and egotism in the style of Montaigne.

Let us not for a moment imagine that Stevenson has stolen these things
and is trying to palm them off on us as his own. He has absorbed them.
He does not know their origin. He gives them out again in joy and in
good faith with zest and amusement and in the excitement of a new
discovery.

If all these many echoing voices do not always ring accurately true, yet
the