and in October 1873 doctors sent him to Mentone for rest and sun. The experiences and the thoughts of those days among the olives may be read in the rough in the letters, or crystallised into the essay, 'Ordered South.' Back in Scotland in the summer of 1874, he began literary work in serious earnest, and with a measure of acceptance, upon criticism and descriptive articles. Mr. Leslie Stephen, then editing the Cornhill,' welcomed the new recruit, and introduced him to another, Mr. W. E. Henley, then in an Edinburgh hospital; and so began one of the most remarkable intimacies of two remarkable lives. In the spring of 1875 Stevenson, accompanying his artist cousin, paid his first visit to a place always dear in his memory, the painters' colony in the forest of Fontainebleau; and later in the same year he returned thither after his call to the Scottish bar. A winter was spent or wasted in attendance at the Parliament House, but his parents now at length became definitely reconciled to his pursuit of the literary career.

The

In 1876 his 'Inland Voyage' was undertaken, and from that adventure he passed again to the forest life at Grez and Barbizon, where he settled down to write. There he met Mrs. Osbourne, the lady who afterwards became his wife; and so began the romance of his life-the one romance which found no reflection in his writings. The next two years were spent between Edinburgh, Fontainebleau, and the artists' quarter in Paris, and the letters of this time betray only one preoccupation -the pursuit of literary excellence and literary success. 'Inland Voyage' was followed by the Travels with a Donkey '; but the critic and essayist began to add a new string to his bow. The story of the Sire de Malétroit's Door' appeared in Temple Bar,' and other tales were on the anvil, among them 'Will o' the Mill.' But in the autumn of 1878 Mrs. Osbourne returned with her children to America; in the next year Stevenson, learning that she proposed to seek a divorce from her husband, and also that she was in ill-health, determined to follow her to California.

Up to this point what more does one want in the way of biography? Stevenson's narratives of travel tell their own tale; the paper called Forest Notes' sketches his life at Barbizon as no one else could sketch it: The Wrecker' makes vivid enough his reminiscences of artist life in Paris; and these can be supplemented from the letters, though at this period his correspondence, as has been said, was concerned almost exclusively with books. What is not here is scarcely like to be in any authorised biography. Stevenson, so curiously frank in many things, never wore his heart upon his sleeve. His

opinions, his habits, the state of his finances, he was ready to proclaim to the world in print; his love-story he kept to himself, and, even if it could be, it is never likely to be divulged. Few marriages ever endured more grievous stress of affliction and discomfort without loss. One may find in the letters here and there such a statement as (for instance) that his marriage was recognised 'A 1 at Lloyd's'; one may read explicitly the praise of his life's companion, the vivid portrait of his wife, in the posthumously published Songs of Travel' -a volume which contains the best of his verses, those in which he finds a lyrical cry for the homeward thoughts of his exile, for the fascination of the open road, the wanderer's life, and the bright eyes of danger.' More than this no one has a right to desire to know. But the strange circumstances which immediately preceded his marriage are now, for the first time, made fully public. He well knew that the errand on which he set out when he left England in 1879 would not commend itself to his parents, and he would not ask them for help, but determined, as Mr. Colvin says, 'to test during this adventure his power of supporting himself, and eventually others, by his own labours in literature.' He travelled by steerage and emigrant train, as is told in the essay 'Across the Plains,' and during the journey was at work taking notes for a volume which should record his experiences, as the 'Inland Voyage,' and Travels with a Donkey' had done. But the trials of the journey told severely on him, and on reaching California he was so ill that he was forced to try his favourite open-air cure, not altogether successfully.

'Here is another curious start in my life,' he writes to Mr. Colvin in September. I am living at an Angora goat-ranche in the Coast Line Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey. I was

camping out, but got so sick that the two rancheros took me in and tended me. One is an old bear-hunter, seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican war; the other a pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under Fremont when California was taken by the States.'

Two nights,' he writes to Mr. Gosse, I lay out under a tree in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire, and make coffee, and all night awake hearing the goat bells ringing and the tree-frogs singing, when each new noise was enough to set me mad. Then the bear-hunter came round, pronounced me "real sick," and ordered me up to the ranche. It was an odd, miserable piece of my life; and according to all rule it should have been my death; but after a while my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success.'

This was surely a long way from Edinburgh or Barbizon. The note to Mr. Gosse was written from Monterey, whither he migrated in October, and where he sat down to write with feverish energy. The Amateur Emigrant' experiences were still in hand; so was an essay on Thoreau; but the drift of his mind had changed or was changing. Fiction gained a larger and larger place in his thoughts; and even in the work that was not fiction his preoccupation was now different. On the steamer he had written 'The Story of a Lie'; from Monterey he sent to Mr. Henley 'The Pavilion on the Links,' one of his very best tales; he was at work on a novel, that never got finished, called 'A Vendetta of the West.' Moreover it was at Monterey that he conceived (as one may learn from the preface to it) that very curious and characteristic comedy in narrative, originally thrown into dramatic form, 'Prince Otto,' which was for a long time cherished in his brain as the future masterpiece. He knew well enough what was happening in his own mind, for in reply to a letter of Mr. Colvin's censuring the execution of the Amateur Emigrant' he wrote:

"If the "Emigrant" was a failure, the "Pavilion," by your leave, was not; it was a story quite adequately and rightly done, I contend. ... I know I shall do better work than ever I have done before; but, mind you, it will not be like it. My sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a jot for the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people. It bored me hellishly to write the "Emigrant"; well, it's going to bore others to read it-that's only fair.'

That was written from San Francisco, whither he had gone in December 1879 with some notion of earning money by journalism—a scheme which found little success. The literary atmosphere of San Francisco, along with Stevenson's experiences there, may be gathered from many lively passages in 'The Wrecker'; the routine of his daily life (in which he had to drop from a fifty-cent to a twenty-five-cent dinner, and ultimately reduced his expenses on food and drink to 1s. 10d. a day, in a country where food is dear) is described in a couple of very gay and amusing letters. But when he wrote that burst of almost aggressive self-confidence to Mr. Colvin, it was in no gay mood. His friend's censure had struck upon him when he was jaded and out of heart, and he put a bold face on the matter to himself and his critic, while at that very time he was sickening for a mortal bout of illness, the gravest that had befallen him since childhood. The accelerating cause was characteristic. There is a strange

passage in one of the letters to Mrs. Sitwell where this youth of five and twenty expresses an emotion very rare in men:

'O, I have such a longing for children of my own; and yet I do not think I could bear it if I had one. I fancy I must feel more like a woman than like a man about that. I sometimes hate the children I see on the street-you know what I mean by hate-wish they were somewhere else, and not there to mock me; and sometimes, again, I don't know how to go by them for the love of them, especially the very wee ones.'

Now, in March 1880, he wrote:

'MY DEAR COLVIN,-My landlord and landlady's little four-yearold child is dying in the house; and, O, what he has suffered. It has really affected my health. O never, never, any family for me! I am cured of that.

'I have taken a long holiday-have not worked for three days, and will not for a week: for I was really weary. Excuse this scratch; for the child weighs on me, dear Colvin. I did all I could to help; but all seems little, to the point of crime, when one of these poor innocents lies in such misery.-Ever yours, R. L. S.'

The next letter from him is dated April; for six weeks it had been a toss-up for life or death.' His future wife nursed him through; his parents, hearing of his extremity, relented, and. telegraphed, 'Count on 250l. annually'; and, after a slow convalescence, he made what he called 'a sort of inarriage in extremis'-being, indeed, no prosperous-looking bridegroom. The story of the first few months of his married life, spent at a deserted mining camp in the Coast Range, is told in the 'Silverado Squatters.' In August 1880 he and his wife came home and were received with open arms; and, from this time onward, domestic dissensions were only an unhappy memory. During the next four years, although compelled to take an invalid's precautions, Stevenson was able to move about freely; and his life was divided between Scotland and some foreign health resort. Davos was tried for two successive winters, but it did not suit Mrs. Stevenson; and for the winter of 1883-4 the family went to the Riviera. After one or two unfortunate experiences, they settled at Hyères, where for sixteen months Stevenson enjoyed a spell of comparative health and happiness. In these years literary success, in the sense that implies an income, was still a thing after which he had to strive; there was still the excitement of the chase, as well as the desire of escape from a position, borne not without some soreness, of inability to earn bread for his own. And for that reason the letters of this time are occupied with little but the cares which relate to

literature as an art and to literature as a business. As a supplement, or rather as an assurance of livelihood, he sought, with little hope, a professorship of history and law at Edinburgh. This failed, as was natural. But in the end of 1882 Treasure Island' appeared, and brought the first instalment of widespread popularity. There were those who read it and looked out eagerly for another story as exciting from the same writer; there were also those, and not a few of them-the writer of these lines was one-who had never heard of this author before, but, having read 'Treasure Island,' proceeded to read whatever else he had written, and thus perceived the versatility and fascination of his genius. The popularity was naturally an encouragement; but, for the moment, a hundred pounds seemed excessive payment for this masterpiece, and the man who had written it saw no grounds for counting with confidence on literature as a support. Still, he was gradually feeling his feet; his essays enjoyed at least a succès d'estime, though the 'Black Arrow,' in which he attempted to hit again the boyish taste to which he had appealed in 'Treasure Island,' missed its mark.

However, if the man was ill at ease, both in mind and body, the artist was happy in his art. Here is a very characteristic letter to Mr. Henley-characteristic of both friends, for Stevenson's letters have this mark of the best correspondence, that one may infer from them the character of the person to whom they are addressed; and an intelligent reader, having gone through the first of these volumes, should be able to decide by internal evidence whether a letter in the second is written, for instance, to Mr. Gosse, Mr. Henley, or Mr. Colvin. There is, at all events, a good deal to be learnt about Mr. Henley from this attractive mixture of sense and nonsense, dated June 1883 :

'DEAR LAD,. I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of "Brashiana" and other works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare to make a first start at trying to understand my profession. O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such oceans! Could one get out of sight of land-all in the blue? Alas not, being anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic being still about us.

'But what a great space and a great air there is in these small shallows where alone we venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the