may estimate the taste of the future by that of
the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most
recent publications of its own day. But _les delicats_ will look back on
Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking,
remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt
as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal--time cannot
stale _Beowulf_, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or
Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, _la mort n'y mord_. But it is
as a writer of prose that Stevenson must be remembered. If he is not the
master British essayist of the later nineteenth century, I really cannot
imagine who is to be preferred to him. His vivacity, vitality, his
original reflections on life, his personal and fascinating style, claim
for him the crown. Nobody, perhaps, places him beside Lamb, and he would
not have dreamed of being equaled in renown with Hazlitt, while he is,
I conceive, more generally sympathetic than Mr. Pater, whose place is
apart, whose province is entirely his own. When we think of Stevenson as
a novelist, there is this conspicuous drawback, that he never did write
a novel on characters and conditions in the mid-stream of the life that
was contemporary with himself. He does not compete, therefore, with
Thackeray and Dickens, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith, but Scott is also no
competitor.

"St. Ronan's Well" is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely
contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the
story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and
of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not
often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that
played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was
infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his
abstention from use of his knowledge. For example, it is obvious that he
could not attempt a romance of the War in the Peninsula, and of life in
London, let us say, while Wellington was holding Torres Vedras. Even
among Stevenson's abandoned projects, there is not, I think, one which
deals with English society in the 'eighties. His health and his fugitive
life imposed on him those limitations against which his taste did not
rebel, for his taste led him to the past, and to adventure in a present
not English, but exotic. He is not in the same field, so t