passeth through these deserts asketh of her 'who
builded them?' And she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth
not."

The frenzy to produce something like this sadly overcomes Stevenson, in
his later essays. But perhaps it were to reason too curiously to pin
Stevenson down to Browne. All the old masters stalk like spectres
through his pages, and among them are the shades of the moderns, even
men that we have dined with.

According to Stevenson, a certain kind of subject requires a certain
"treatment," and the choice of his tone follows his title. These
"treatments" are always traditional, and even his titles tread closely
on the heels of former titles. He can write the style of Charles Lamb
better than Lamb could do it himself, and his Hazlitt is very nearly as
good. He fences with his left hand as well as with his right, and can
manage two styles at once like Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from
the 7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined about it.

It is with a pang of disappointment that we now and then come across a
style which we recognize, yet cannot place.

People who take enjoyment in the reminiscences awakened by conjuring of
this kind can nowhere in the world find a master like Stevenson. Those
persons belong to the bookish classes. Their numbers are insignificant,
but they are important because they give countenance to the admiration
of others who love Stevenson with their hearts and souls.

The reason why Stevenson represents a backward movement in literature,
is that literature lives by the pouring into it of new words from
speech, and new thoughts from life, and Stevenson used all his powers to
exclude both from his work. He lived and wrote in the past. That this
Scotchman should appear at the end of what has been a very great period
of English literature, and summarize the whole of it in his two hours'
traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place in the history of that
literature. He is the Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is impossible
to assign him rank in any line of writing. If you shut your eyes to try
and place him, you find that you cannot do it. The effect he produces
while we are reading him vanishes as we lay down the book, and we can
recall nothing but a succession of flavors. It is not to be expected
that posterity will take much interest in him, for his point and meaning
are impressional. He is ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the
mistletoe of English lit