or description, a wonderfully supple instrument of expression.  If the style of his essays is at times mannered, the charge can not be made against his representative fiction:  “Prince Otto” stands alone in this respect, and that captivating, comparatively early romance, confessedly written under the influence of Meredith, is a delicious literary experiment rather than a deeply-felt piece of life.  Perhaps the central gift of all is that for character—­is it, in truth, not the central gift for any weaver of fiction?  So we thought in studying Dickens.  Stevenson’s creations wear the habit of life, yet with more than life’s grace of carriage; they are seen picturesquely without, but also psychologically within.  In a marvelous portrayal like that of John Silver in “Treasure Island” the result is a composite of what we see and what we shudderingly guess:  eye and mind are satisfied alike.  Even in a mere sketch, such as that of the blind beggar at the opening of the same romance, with the tap-tap of his stick to announce his coming, we get a remarkable example of effect secured by an economy of details; that tap-tapping gets on your nerves, you never forget it.  It seems like the memory of a childhood terror on the novelist’s part.  Throughout his fiction this chemic union of fact and the higher fact that is of the imagination marks his work.  The smell of the heather is in our nostrils as we watch Allan’s flight, and looking on at the fight in the round-house, there is a physical impression of the stuffiness of the place; you smell as well as see it.  Or for quite another key, take the night duel in “The Master of Ballantrae.”  You cannot think of it without feeling the bite of the bleak air; once more the twinkle of the candles makes the scene flicker before you ere it vanish into memory-land.  Again, how you know that sea-coast site in the opening of “The Pavilion on the Links”—­shiver at the “sly innuendoes of the place”!  Think how much the map in “Treasure Island” adds to the credibility of the thing.  It is the believableness of Stevenson’s atmospheres that prepare the reader for any marvels enacted in them.  Gross, present-day, matter-of-fact London makes Dr. Jekyll and his worser half of flesh-and-blood credence.  Few novelists of any race have beaten this wandering Scot in the power of representing character and envisaging it:  and there can hardly be successful characterization without this allied power of creating atmosphere.

Nothing is falser than to find him imitative in his representative work.  There may be a suspicion of made-to-order journalism in “The Black Arrow,” and the exception of “Prince Otto,” which none the less we love for its gallant spirit and smiling grace, has been noted.  But of the Scotch romances nothing farther from the truth could be said.  They stand or fall by themselves:  they have no model—­save that of sound art and a normal conception of human life.  Rarely does this man fall below his own high level or fail to set his private