singular combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accident has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous followers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragical gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein. of his body, set himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty of style. .............
"Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the roundhouse on board the brig Covenant; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,—all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and these awaken the echoes of primeval fear. The cry of the parrot—'Pieces of eight'—the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlor, and the similar effects of inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in Kidnapped, and of the disguise of a blind leper in The Black Arrow, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of Admiral Guinea, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's screams of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he was unseen, and so realizes
