A delightful master of style, Robert Louis Stevenson, in a recent enumeration of the books which have influenced him in life, mentions, as among the most charming of characterizations, the older Artagnan of the Vicomte de Bragelonne.  I feel sure that on the sick-bed, of which he does not hesitate to speak, he must have learned, as I did, to appreciate this charming book.  I made acquaintance then, also, with what seems to me, however, the most artistic of Dumas’s works, and one so little known that to name it is a benefit, or may be, the Chevalier d’Harmenthal.

In the long road towards working health, I must have found, as my note-books show, immense leisure, and equal capacity to absorb a quantity of fiction, good and bad, and to find in some of it things about my own art which excited amused comment, and but for that would long ago have been forgotten.  Among the stuff which I more or less listlessly read was an astonishing book called “Norwood.”  It set me to thinking, because in this book are recounted many things concerning sick or wounded folk, and those astonishing surgeons and nurses who are supposed to have helped them on to their feet again.

The ghastly amusement which came to me out of the young lady in this volume, who amputates a man’s leg, made me reflect a little about the mode in which writers of fiction have dealt with sick people and doctors.  I lay half awake, and thought over this in no unkindly critical mood,

  “With now and then a merry thought,
  And now and then a sad one,”

until I built myself a great literary hospital, such as would delight Miss Nightingale.  For in it I had a Scott ward, and a Dickens ward, and a Bulwer ward, and a Thackeray ward, with a very jolly lot of doctors, such as Drs. Goodenough and Firmin, with the Little Sister (out of Philip) and Miss Evangeline to take care of the patients, besides cells for Charles Reade’s heroes and heroines, and the apothecary (out of Romeo and Juliet) to mix more honest doses than he gave to luckless Romeo.

Should you wander with a critical doctor through those ghostly wards, you would see some queerer results of battle and fray than ever the doctors observe nowadays,—­cases I should like to report, it might be:  poisonings that would have bewildered Orfila, heart-diseases that would have astounded Corvisart, and those wonderful instances of consumption which render that most painful of diseases so delightful to die of—­in novels.  I have no present intention to weary my readers with a clinic in those crowded wards, but it will ease my soul a little if I may say my say in a general fashion about the utter absurdities of most of these pictures of disease and death-beds.  In older times the sickness of a novel was merely a feint to gain time in the story or account for a non-appearance, and the doctor made very brief show upon the stage.  Since, however, the growth of realism in literary art, the temptation to delineate