he cherished the flame of joyous romance with more than Vestal fervor, and kept it ardent in a body which Nature, unkind from the beginning, seemed to delight in visiting with more unkindness—­a “soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed” almost from birth.  And his books leave the impression that he did this chiefly from a sense of duty:  that he labored and kept the lamp alight chiefly because, for the time, other and stronger men did not.

Had there been another Scott, another Dumas—­if I may change the image—­to take up the torch of romance and run with it, I doubt if Stevenson would have offered himself.  I almost think in that case he would have consigned with Nature and sat at ease, content to read of new Ivanhoes and new D’Artagnans:  for—­let it be said again—­no man had less of the ignoble itch for merely personal success.  Think, too, of what the struggle meant for him:  how it drove him unquiet about the world, if somewhere he might meet with a climate to repair the constant drain upon his feeble vitality; and how at last it flung him, as by a “sudden freshet,” upon Samoa—­to die “far from Argos, dear land of home.”

And then consider the brave spirit that carried him—­the last of a great race—­along this far and difficult path; for it is the man we must consider now, not, for the moment, his writings.  Fielding’s voyage to Lisbon was long and tedious enough; but almost the whole of Stevenson’s life has been a voyage to Lisbon, a voyage in the very penumbra of death.  Yet Stevenson spoke always as gallantly as his great predecessor.  Their “cheerful stoicism,” which allies his books with the best British breeding, will keep them classical as long as our nation shall value breeding.  It shines to our dim eyes now, as we turn over the familiar pages of Virginibus Puerisque, and from page after page—­in sentences and fragments of sentences—­“It is not altogether ill with the invalid after all” ...  “Who would project a serial novel after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course.” [He had two books at least in hand and uncompleted, the papers say.] “Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?” ...  “What sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is!” ...  “It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.  By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates over a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week....  For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young....  The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.”

As it was in Virginibus Puerisque, so is it in the last essay in his last book of essays:—­