It is difficult to think of Robert Louis Stevenson as other than the creator of delightful and weird romances. His name always calls up Treasure Island—not to mention the other progeny of his fruitful imagination—Treasure Island and the higher geography. Stevenson will always stand forth as master of the finest artistry and as a modern symbol of the imagination. And it seems nothing short of sheer prose to turn from the fairy world flung into space by the deftness and swiftness of this man's fancy to our gray world of every day.

Yet Dr. Japp and Mr. Zangwill both insist that he will finally be remembered as an essayist and not as a romancer. We must all of us agree, I think, that whatever comes of Stevenson the fictionist, Stevenson the essayist has enriched the world by his half-dozen slim volumes of comment on life and men. If we think of the essay as a bit of preachment, we may still think of Stevenson as an essayist. He seems to like the rôle of preacher; and whatever our own homiletical notions may be, we must admit that his preaching is always fresh, human, and in good spirit; his truths stay with us and his disclosures send us afield for more truth,—qualities all preaching does not possess. “To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family the happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.” This is commonplace truth put with such finality and authority that, if it has not become scripture, it has at least served as a text for not a few preachers.