tter than other
folk's corn" says our proverb. In his day, I bored him by pressing him
to write more, and more rapidly; he never could have been commonplace,
he never could have been less than excellent. But his conscience was
adamant: no man was less of an improviser, as, fortunately, Scott was;
had he _not_ been, there would not be so many Waverley Novels.

Stevenson was hard on Scott, who wrote much as he himself did in
boyhood. "I forgot to say," remarks the early Stevensonian hero, after
describing a day full of adventures with Red Indians, "that I had made
love to a beautiful girl." There is a faint resemblance to this
over-sight in a long sentence of "Guy Mannering," which Stevenson
criticized; but "Guy Mannering" was written in about six weeks, "to
refresh the machine." Fastidious himself, conscientious almost to a
fault in style, Stevenson's joy was in the romances of Xavier de
Montepin and Fortune du Boisgobey, names which suggest

"Old crusading knights austere,
That bore King Louis company."

When Dumas and Scott, and perhaps Mrs. Radcliffe, had been read too
recently, Louis went to Fortune and Xavier, and, doubtless, to the
father of them, Gaboriau. None of these benefactors of the race was a
student of style, but they gave him what Thackeray liked, stories "hot,
_with_," as he says, briefly but adequately.

All of us are led, like that ancient people Israel, like all humanity,
by a way we know not, and a path we do not understand. If some
benevolent genie, who understood Stevenson's qualities and genius, could
have directed his career, how would that spirit have educated him?

For some reason not intelligible he was put on an allowance of five
shillings weekly, for his _menus plaisirs_, till he was twenty-three
years of age. He never was an expensive man (except in giving, wherein
he knew no stint); his favourite velvet coats, his yellow shoes, his
black shirts, with a necktie of a scrap of carpet, he said (I failed to
guess its nature), were not extravagant. (The last occasion on which I
saw him in the legendary velvet coat was also the only moment in which I
viewed the author of his being. The circumstances were of the wildest
comedy, but the tale can never be told; though in all respects it
redounds to the credit of everybody concerned. Not one of us let a laugh
out of himself.)

But a young man in his position likes to do many harmless things which
cannot be done on five shillings a week