“He stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.” She is forced to judge him as the pure intellectual must judge the man of tumultuous and undirected genius. His confidential egoism might well have been her own despair, so disinclined is she really to open her heart to you save under pretty disguises, and you would hardly have thought his style, soaring “to the rhetorical sublime” or dropping to “hard Saxon slang” to be the style she loved. Yet this was she who did not choose her friends for the intellectual rightness in them but something pure human, as wayward, when you would define it, as the tang of the weather. Toward the close of this essay she rushes into some fine direct English of her own. Hazlitt’s diction, she affirms, is “joyously clear,” “sumptuously splendid” and concludes that “no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” This, later on when life had taught her things hard to learn, she said, in a fuller form, as touching not style but letters in their entirety: “After all, life, not art, is the thing.” To that same growing conviction it was that Hazlitt appealed, a “born humanist,” with a “memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.” Her bright light—perhaps not the guiding light, for her genius was ever an individual one and moved, for the most part, unperturbed in its own orbit—was Robert Louis Stevenson. The youth of his day will remember how he took hold on even the popular imagination, fighting his predestined fight with disease and weather, doubling on death, and, while he fled—the hovering fate bound, in the end, to clutch him—setting his mind to the weaving of bright adventure and his hand to the writing of it. That gayety of temperamental bravado, that piquing drama of a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals and sending out his mind to roam the seas and centuries, were intoxicating to venturesome spirits. In 1895, Louise Guiney writes of hearing from a “most brilliant boy” in San Francisco: “He says something that has set me up for life: that Mrs. Stevenson told him R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little doings, and used to ‘search for them in such magazines as came to Samoa.’ I will keep on writing, I will; I shall never despair after that.” To Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study, privately printed in 1895, she contributed a notable sonnet, the sestette beginning: “Louis, our priest of letters and our knight,” and a longer Valediction of a metre disturbing to the unpractised ear, but full of isolated lines of an individual beauty and also of a real grief: the lament of the pupil over his master, signalized in the significant line: “The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone.”