If Tennyson’s interviewer has ever had a rival in the important art which has been discussed--for the benefit of youthful ambition--in this article, we are inclined to think that that rival was the Rev. Aris Willmott. This now almost forgotten writer was a very voluminous author both in verse and prose; but his merits were not appreciated by an ungrateful public so much as they ought to have been. He resorted, therefore, to the following exquisitely ingenious device. He published a handsome volume, which is now before us, entitled _Gems from English Literature_, thus arranged: Bacon, Rev. Aris Willmott, Jeremy Taylor, Rev. Aris Willmott, Barrow, Rev. Aris Willmott, sandwiching himself regularly through the prose classics, and in the same way through the poets--Shakespeare, Rev. Aris Willmott, Milton, Rev. Aris, etc. As birthday books, press notices, interviews at home, portraits of distinguished authors in their studies, and the like are getting a little stale, we cordially recommend this rev. gentleman’s expedient--it may be judiciously modified--to the notice of all who are unable to distinguish fame from notoriety. R. L. STEVENSON’S LETTERS[22] [Footnote 22: _The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends._ Selected and Edited with Notes and Introduction by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols.] The late Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer who has every title to commiseration, and the appearance of the volumes before us may be said to mark the climax of his misfortunes. Diseased and sickly from his birth, with his life frequently hanging on a thread, he probably never knew the sensation of perfect health. During the impressionable years of early youth his surroundings appear to have been most uncongenial; he was forced into a profession for which he had no taste and no aptitude. In constant straits for money, at times he was miserably poor; his apprenticeship to letters was long and arduous, for he was not one of Nature’s favourites, and attained what he did attain by unsparing and severe labour. His wandering and restless life, bringing him as it did into contact with all phases of humanity and with all parts of the world, was of course in many respects favourable to his work, but it had at the same time serious disadvantages. It gave him little time for reflection; it imported a certain feverishness into his energy, and rendered that concentration and steadiness, without which no really great work can be accomplished, impossible. That in these circumstances Stevenson should have produced so much, and so much which is of a high order of merit, is most creditable to him, and not a little surprising. “He stands,” says his friend Professor Colvin, “as the writer who in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms--the moral, critical and personal essay, travels sentimental and