appearances; and the general knot so presented is indeed a hard one to untie. Yet we may take it for a matter regarding which such publications as Mr. Colvin’s have much to suggest. There is no absolute privacy—save of course when the exposed subject may have wished or endeavoured positively to constitute it; and things too sacred are often only things that are not perhaps at all otherwise superlative. One may hold both that people—that artists perhaps in particular—are well advised to cover their tracks, and yet that our having gone behind, or merely stayed before, in a particular case, may be a minor question compared with our having picked up a value. Personal records of the type before us can at any rate obviously be but the reverse of a deterrent to the urged inquirer. They are too happy an instance—they positively make for the risked indiscretion. Stevenson never covered his tracks, and the tracks prove perhaps to be what most attaches us. We follow them here, from year to year and from stage to stage, with the same charmed sense with which he has made us follow some hunted hero in the heather. Life and fate and an early catastrophe were ever at his heels, and when he at last falls fighting, sinks down in the very act of valour, the “happy ending,” as he calls it for some of his correspondents, is, though precipitated and not conventional, essentially given us. His descent and his origin all contribute to the picture, which it seems to me could scarce—since we speak of “endings”—have had a better beginning had he himself prearranged it. Without prearrangements indeed it was such a cluster of terms as could never be wasted on him, one of those innumerable matters of “effect,” Scotch and other, that helped to fill his romantic consciousness. Edinburgh, in the first place, the “romantic town,” was as much his “own” as it ever was the great precursor’s whom, in “Weir of Hermiston” as well as elsewhere, he presses so hard; and this even in spite of continual absence—in virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession. The immediate background formed by the profession of his family—the charge of the public lights on northern coasts—was a setting that he could not have seen his way to better; while no less happy a condition was met by his being all lonely in his father’s house—the more that the father, admirably commemorated by the son and after his fashion as strongly marked, was antique and strenuous, and that the son, a genius to be and of frail constitution, was (in the words of the charming anecdote of an Edinburgh lady retailed in one of these volumes), if not exactly what could be called bonny, “pale, penetrating and interesting.” The poet in him had from the first to be pacified—temporarily, that is, and from hand to mouth, as is the manner for poets; so that with friction and tension playing their part, with the filial relation quite classically troubled, with breaks of tradition