classical and slang, with good stores of the French, and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression or affection, the mood or freak of the moment. Passages or phrases of the craziest schoolboy or seafaring slang come tumbling after and capping others of classical cadence and purity, of poetical and heartfelt eloquence. By this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson’s letters at their best—the pick, let us say, of those in the following volumes which were written from Hyères or Bournemouth—come nearer than anything else to the full-blooded charm and variety of his conversation. Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only that this genial spirit rose to his very best. Those whom his writings charm or impress, but who never knew him, can but imagine how doubly they would have been charmed and impressed by his presence. Few men probably, certainly none that I have ever seen or read of, have had about them such a richness and variety of human nature; and few can ever have been better gifted than he was to express the play of being that was in him by means of the apt, expressive word and the animated look and gesture. _Divers et ondoyant_, in the words of Montaigne, beyond other men, he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of singularly assorted characters—the poet and artist, the moralist and preacher, the humourist and jester, the man of great heart and tender conscience, the man of eager appetite and curiosity, the Bohemian, impatient of restraints and shams, the adventurer and lover of travel and of action: characters, several of them, not rare separately, especially among his Scottish fellow-countrymen, but rare indeed to be found united, and each in such fulness and intensity, within the bounds of a single personality. Before all things Stevenson was a born poet, to whom the world was full of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape and substance in the forms art. It was his birthright— ‘to hear The great bell beating far and near— The odd, unknown, enchanted gong That on the road hales men along, That from the mountain calls afar, That lures the vessel from a star, And with a still, aerial sound Makes all the earth enchanted ground.’