It is "ask and have" with this man. Like Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an instance in point. Any one familiar with Mérimée's stories will smile at the naïveté with which Stevenson has taken the leading idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we have "fables," moralities, and psychology, Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will O' the Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, in which people say, "Ye can go, boy; for I will keep your good friend and my good gossip company till curfew--aye, and by St. Mary till the Sun get up again." We must have opera bouffe, as in Prince Otto; melodrama, as in The Pavilion on the Links; the essay of almost biblical solemnity in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming humor in the style of Charles Lamb, the essay of introspection and egotism in the style of Montaigne. Let us not for a moment imagine that Stevenson has stolen these things and is trying to palm them off on us as his own. He has absorbed them. He does not know their origin. He gives them out again in joy and in good faith with zest and amusement and in the excitement of a new discovery. If all these many echoing voices do not always ring accurately true, yet their number is inordinate and remarkable. They will not bear an immediate comparison with their originals; but we may be sure that the vintages of Mephistopheles would not have stood a comparison with real wine. One of the books which established Stevenson's fame was the New Arabian Nights. The series of tales about Prince Florizel of Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and altogether delightful departure in light literature. The stories are a frank and wholesome caricature of the French detective story. They are legitimate pieces of literature because they are burlesque, and because the smiling Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the pages of Stevenson is for this time the acknowledged showman of the piece. A burlesque is always an imitation shown off by the foil of some incongruous setting. The setting in this case Stevenson found about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the railways of sordid and complicated London. In this early book Stevenson seems to have stumbled upon the true employment of his powers without realizing the treasure trove, for he hardly returned to the field of humor, for which his gifts most happily fitted him. As a writer of burlesque he truly expresses himself. He is full of genuine fun. The fantastic is half brother to the burlesque. Each implies some original as a point of departure, and as a scheme for treatment some framework upon which the author's wit and fancy shall be lavished.