is beginning with Mr. Stevenson's creations. Mr. Stevenson's special type, the type he loves best, and devotes his most precious thoughts to elaborate, is that which for want of a better term, we must call the boy-hero with a difference. His greatest contribution to literature is the boy who acts the part of a hero, but yet is at the same time always a thorough boy and a real boy,—and by this we do not mean an angelic person of the choirboy order, but that curious mixture of irresponsibility and shrewdness, boldness and shyness, waywardness and hard common sense, which constitutes the true boy."—London Spectator, August 11, 1894.
"He (Stevenson) was never satisfied with himself, yet never cast down. There are two dangers that beset the artist,—the one is being pleased with what is done, and the other being de-| jected with it. Stevenson, more than any other man whom I have known, steered the middle course. He never conceived that he had achieved a great success, but he never lost hope that by taking pains he might yet do so. … 'One should strain,' he said, 'and then play, strain again, and play again. The strain is for us, it educates; the play is for the reader, and pleases. In moments of effort one learns to do the easy things that people like.'
"He learned that which he desired, and he gained more than he hoped for. He became the most exquisite English writer of his generation; yet those who lived close to him are apt to think less of this than of the fact that he was the most unselfish and the most lovable of human beings."—Edmund Gosse's Critical Kit-Kats.
"People were fond of him, and people were proud of him; his achievements, as it were, sensibly raised their pleasure in the world, and, to them, became parts of themselves. They warmed their hands at that centre of light and heat. It is not every success which has these beneficent results. We see the successful sneered at, deceived, insulted, even when success is deserved. Very little of all this, hardly aught of all this, I think, came in Mr. Stevenson's way. …
