erature whose roots are not in the soil but in
the tree.

But enough of the nature and training of Stevenson which fitted him to
play the part he did. The cyclonic force which turned him from a
secondary London novelist into something of importance and enabled him
to give full play to his really unprecedented talents will be recognized
on glancing about us.

We are now passing through the age of the Distribution of Knowledge. The
spread of the English-speaking race since 1850, and the cheapness of
printing, have brought in primers and handbooks by the million. All the
books of the older literatures are being abstracted and sown abroad in
popular editions. The magazines fulfil the same function; every one of
them is a penny cyclopedia. Andrew Lang heads an army of organized
workers who mine in the old literature and coin it into booklets and
cash.

The American market rules the supply of light literature in Great
Britain. While Lang culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the Norse
or Provensal, Stevenson will engage to supply us with tales and legends
of his own--something just as good. The two men serve the same public.

Stevenson's reputation in England was that of a comparatively light
weight, but his success here was immediate. We hailed him as a
classic--or something just as good. Everything he did had the very stamp
and trademark of Letters, and he was as strong in one department as
another. We loved this man; and thenceforward he purveyed "literature"
to us at a rate to feed sixty millions of people and keep them clamoring
for more.

Does any one believe that the passion of the American people for
learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? Does any
one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? It
creates an eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is a power like
Niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people
for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact
there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the arts, this
importation of culture by the carload. The state of mind it shows is a
definite and typical state of mind which each individual passes through,
and which precedes the discovery that real things are better than sham.
When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hundred thousand dollars' worth of
Louis XV. furniture to be made--and most well made--in Buffalo, and when
the American public gives Stevenson an or