The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as we have seen, in the direction of the novel proper—­the character-study of modern ordinary life.  But, even as early as Esmond and Hypatia, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott, and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it for the last quarter of a century.  Still, though we have mentioned other examples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till, towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone gave it a fresh hold on the public taste.  Some ten years later again there came to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson.  He was a member of the famous family of light-house engineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he was actually called.  But law was as little to his taste as engineering, and he slowly gravitated towards literature—­the slowness being due, not merely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (though some of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire to work himself out a style of his own by the process of “sedulously aping” others.  It may be very much doubted whether this process ever gave any one a style of perfect freedom:  and it may be questioned further whether Stevenson ever attained such a style.

    [27] Anthony Trollope, in one of the discursive passages in his
    early books, has left positive testimony to the distaste with
    which publishers regarded it.

But there could be no question that he did attain very interesting and artistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reaction against what was called “slovenliness” and a demand for careful preparation and planned effect in prose-writing.  Even so, however, it was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction.  He began with essays, literary and miscellaneous, and with personal accounts of travel:  and certain critical friends of his strongly urged him to continue in this way.  During the years 1878 and 1879, in a short-lived periodical called London, which came to be edited by his friend the late Mr. Henley and had a very small staff, he issued certain New Arabian Nights which caught the attention of one or two of his fellow-contributors very strongly, and made them certain that a new power in fiction-writing had arisen.  It did not, however, at first much attract the public:  and it was the kind of thing which never attracts publishers until the public forces their hands.  For a time he had to wait, and to take what opportunity he could get of periodical publication, “boy’s book"-writing, and the like.  In fact Treasure Island (1883), with which he at last made his mark, is to this day classed as a boy’s book