Henley, Stevenson says: “These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life.” To those who knew him in these past days to re-read these papers seem to travel the same road again in the same good company. They recall the slight, boyish-looking youth they knew, and to those who live under the stars which Stevenson thought shone so bright—the Edinburgh street lamps—he was not so much the famous author, as the sympathetic comrade, the unique, ideal talker we welcomed of yore. As he truly said, “The powers and the ground of friendship are a mystery,” but looking back I can discern in part we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. FOOTNOTE: [1] A clachan is a wooden racket Edinburgh Academy boys play ball with. Mr. Gilbert Parker’s Sonnets BY Richard Henry Stoddard MR. GILBERT PARKER’S SONNETS.[2] A SEQUENCE of songs, of which this collection of Mr. Parker’s sonnets is an example, is more recondite and remote than most of its readers probably imagine. It would be as difficult to trace its origins as to trace springs, which, flowing from many subterranean sources, unite somewhere in one current, and force their way onward and upward until they appear at last, and are hailed as the well-heads of famous rivers. Who will may trace its beginnings to the lays of the troubadours, which were nothing if they were not amorous: I am content to find them on Italian soil in the sonnets of Petrarch, and on English soil in the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey. What the literatures of Greece and Rome were to men of letters the world over, once they were freed from the seclusion of the manuscripts which sheltered them so long, the literature of Italy was to English men of letters from the days of Chaucer down. They read Italian more than they read Latin and Greek: they wrote Italian, not more clumsily, let us hope, than they wrote English: and they sojourned in Italy, if they could get there, not greatly to their spiritual welfare, if the satirists of their time are to be believed. One need not be deeply read in English literature of the sixteenth century to perceive its obligations to Italian literature, to detect the influences of Boccaccio, and Bandello, and other Italian story-tellers in its drama, and the influence of Italian poets in its poetry, particularly the influence of Petrarch, the sweetness, the grace, the ingenuity of whose amorous effusions captivated the facile nature of so many English singers. He was the master of Wyatt and Surrey, who, tracking their way through the snow of his footprints, introduced the sonnet form into English verse, and, so far as they might, the sonnet spirit, as they understood it. They allowed themselves, however, licenses of variation in the construction of their octaves and sextets, which, judging from his avoidance of them, would have displeased Petrarch,—a proceeding which was followed by their immediate successors, who seldom observed the strict laws of the Petrarchian sonnet.