ate archaism.

Although we think of Stevenson as a writer of fiction, his extreme
popularity is due in great measure to his innumerable essays and bits
of biography and autobiography, his letters, his journals, and travels
and miscellaneous reminiscences.

It was his own belief that he was a very painstaking and conscientious
artist, and this is true to a great extent. On the day of his death he
was engaged upon the most highly organized and ambitious thing he ever
attempted, and every line of it shows the hand of an engraver on steel.
But it is also true that during the last years of his life he lived
under the pressure of photographers and newspaper syndicates, who came
to him with great sums of money in their hands. He was exploited by the
press of the United States, and this is the severest ordeal which a
writer of English can pass through. There was one year in which he
earned four thousand pounds. His immeasurable generosity kept him
forever under the harrow in money matters, and added another burden to
the weight carried by this dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder
that some of his work is trivial. The wonder is that he should have
produced it at all.

The journalistic work of Stevenson, beginning with his Inland Voyage,
and the letters afterwards published as Across the Plains, is valuable
in the inverse ratio to its embellishment. Sidney Colvin suggested to
him that in the letters Across the Plains the lights were turned down.
But, in truth, the light is daylight. The letters have a freshness that
midnight oil could not have improved, and this fugitive sketch is of
more permanent interest than all the polite essays he ever wrote.

If we compare the earlier with the later work of Stevenson as a magazine
writer, we are struck with the accentuation of his mannerisms. It is not
a single style which grows more intense, but his amazing skill in many
which has increased.

The following is a specimen of Stevenson's natural style, and it would
be hard to find a better:--

"The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who
got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern
platform singing The Sweet By-and-By with very tuneful voices; the
chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business
of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for the train stopping
at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives,
wives and fathers, young