Another novelist of about equal status with Trollope in mid-Victorian fiction is =George John Whyte Melville (1821-1878)=. Major Whyte Melville is the novelist of all lovers of the hunting-field, and strangely enough he fell a victim to the very sport which he had done so much to picture. He was killed by a fall from his horse. Whyte Melville's hunting novels include "Katerfelto" and "Black but Comely." He also wrote historical novels, of which "The Queen's Maries" and "The Gladiators" were the most popular, and he had a pretty gift of verse. Literature has rarely produced a more picturesque figure than =Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)=. The son of a famous Scottish engineer he was destined, like his great countryman Sir Walter Scott, for a Writership to the Signet. He took, however, to literature instead, and died at forty-four in Samoa,--where he had gone for his health,--after a remarkable literary achievement. With a style not always rigidly grammatical, but always impressive and distinguished, he shone in many branches of literary work. He wrote travel pictures like "With a Donkey in the Cevennes," which were incomparably superior to those of any contemporary; his plays--written in collaboration with Mr W. E. Henley--had a power of their own, and one of them, "Beau Austin," although not accepted by the public, is probably the greatest contribution to the drama of the era. As a critic of life and of books Stevenson has also an honourable place. I know of no better treatment of the one than "Virginibus Puerisque," or of the other than "Some Aspects of Robert Burns." He has given abundant pleasure to children by "A Child's Garden of Verses," and in "Underwoods" he has scarcely less successfully appealed to their elders. It is as a novelist, however, that Stevenson fills the largest place. He is the inheritor of the traditions of Scott, with the world-pain of his own epoch superadded. Men and boys alike have found "Treasure Island" absorbing, while men have also pondered over the widely different powers which are displayed in "The New Arabian Nights" and "The Master of Ballantrae," "Prince Otto," and "St Ives." "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" is a parable which has thrilled us all. Stevenson delighted to call Mr George Meredith his master, and the two men were friends of years. =George Meredith (1828- )= began his literary career in 1851, with a volume of poems, one of which, "Love in a Valley," is still an unqualified joy to all who read it. Mr Meredith has published several volumes of poems since then, and all of them have their loyal admirers, but it is as a novelist that the world at large appraises him.