Borrow’s characters do not speak Borrow so emphatically as do Stevenson’s characters speak Stevenson. And with Stevenson it matters more. Borrow’s picturesque, vivid, but loose, loquacious style, fits his subject-matter on the whole very well. But Stevenson’s delicate, nervous, mannerized style suits but ill some of the scenes he is describing. If it suits, it suits by a happy accident, as in the delightful sentimentality, _Providence and the Guitar_. To appraise Stevenson’s merits as a Romantic one has to read him after reading Scott, Dumas, Victor Hugo; or, better still, to peruse these giants after dallying with Ariel. We realize then what it is that we had vaguely missed in Stevenson—the human touch. These men believe in the figments of their imagination, and make us believe in them. Stevenson is obviously sceptical as to their reality; we can almost see a furtive smile upon his lip as he writes. But there is nothing unreal about the man, whatever we feel of the Artist. In his critical comments on men and matters, especially when Hamlet and the Shorter Catechist come into view, we shall find a vigorous sanity, a shrewd yet genial outlook, that seems to say there is no make-believe _here_; _here_ I am not merely amusing myself; here, honestly and heartily admitted, you may find the things that life has taught me. III Stevenson had many sides, but there were two especially that reappear again and again, and were the controlling forces in his nature. One was the Romantic element, the other the Artistic. It may be thought that these twain have much in common; but it is not so. In poetry the first gives us a Blake, a Shelley; the second a Keats, a Tennyson. Variety, fresh points of view, these are the breath of life to the Romantic. But for the Artist there is one constant, unchanging ideal. The Romantic ventures out of sheer love of the venture, the other out of sheer love for some definite end in view. It is not usual to find them coexisting as they did in Stevenson, and their dual existence gives an added piquancy and interest to his work. It is the Vagabond Romantic in him that leads him into so many byways and secret places, that sends him airily dancing over the wide fields of literature; ever on the move, making no tabernacle for himself in any one grove. And it is the Artist who gives that delicacy of finish, that exquisitive nicety of touch, to the veriest trifle that he essays. The matter may be beggarly, the manner is princely.