but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me beating on toy drums, and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms.” The indignant letter to the _New York Tribune_, in defence of James Payn, who had been accused of plagiarising from one of Stevenson’s fictions, well deserves placing on permanent record, as an illustration of his chivalrous loyalty to his friends. We are sorry, we repeat, that these letters have been given to the world. So far as Stevenson’s reputation is concerned they can only detract from it. When they illustrate him on his best side they merely emphasise what his works illustrate so abundantly that further illustration is a mere work of supererogation. When they present him, as for the most part they do, in dishabille, they exhibit him very greatly to his disadvantage. If Professor Colvin had printed about one-third of them, and retained his excellent elucidatory introductions, which form practically a biography of Stevenson, he would have produced a work for which all admirers of that most pleasing writer would have thanked him. As it is, he has been guilty, in our opinion, of a grave error of judgment. LITERARY ICONOCLASM[23] [Footnote 23: _The Authorship of the Kingis Quair._ A New Criticism by J. T. T. Brown.] Among the worthies of the fifteenth century there is no more interesting and picturesque figure than the Poet-King of Scotland, James I. Long before the poem on which his fame rests was given to the world, tradition had assigned him a high place among native makers, and his countrymen had been proud to add to the names of Dunbar and Douglas, of Henryson and Lyndsay, the name of the best of their kings. Great was their joy, therefore, when, in 1783, William Tytler gave public proof that the good King’s title to the laurel was no mere title by courtesy, but that he had been the author of a poem which could fairly be regarded as one of the gems of Scottish literature. There cannot, in truth, be two opinions about the _Kingis Quair_. It is a poem of singular charm and beauty, and, though it is modelled closely on certain of Chaucer’s minor poems, and is in other respects largely indebted to them, it is no servile imitation; it bears the impress of original genius, not so much in details and incident as in tone, colour, and touch; it is a brilliant and most memorable achievement, and Rossetti hardly exaggerates when he describes it as “More sweet than ever a poet’s heart Gave yet to the English tongue.”