Athens or Judah could produce it; and both Assyria and Rome perished like Athens and Judah.

But you are something more than a people of fifty millions. You are fifty millions mainly sprung-as we in England are mainly sprung-from that German stock, which has faults indeed-faults which have diminished the extent of its influence, diminished its power of attraction, and the interest of its history. Yet of that German stock it is, I think trueas my father said more than fifty years ago—that it has been a stock "of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen, with the soundest laws, the least violent passions, the fairest domestic and civil virtues." You come, therefore, of about the best parentage which a modern nation can have.

Then you have had, as we in England have also had-but more entirely than we, and more exclusively-the Puritan discipline. Certainly I am not blind to the faults of that discipline. Certainly I do not wish it to remain in possession of the field forever, or too long. But as a stage and a discipline, and as means for enabling that poor, inattentive and immoral creature, man, to love and appropriate, and make part of his being, divine ideas, on which he could not otherwise have laid or kept hold, the discipline of Puritanism has been invaluable; and the more I read history, the more I see of mankind, the more I recognize its value.

Well, then, you are not merely a multitude of fifty millions; you are fifty millions sprung from this excellent Germanic stock, having passed through this excellent Puritan discipline, and set in this enviable and unbounded country. Even supposing, therefore, that by the necessity of things your majority must in the present stage of the world probably be unsound, what a remnant, I say—what an incomparable, all-transforming remnant-you may fairly hope, with your number- if things go happily—to have.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

It is not generally safe to anticipate the verdict of posterity, but there are things which this writer has produced which may be trusted to survive the tests of time. Stevenson was literary,

first by organization, then by resolute study and training; his heart was in his work, and he never ceased to try to improve himself yet further, and to satisfy, if it were possible, himself as well as his public. In this age of gross adulation of success, few have received so much adulation as he; but he would not let it spoil him ; he kept his ideal ever in view, and pursued it as it fled, horizon-like, before him.

He was born in 1850 and educated in Edinburgh, and was admitted there to the Bar, but never practiced. He was a delicate boy, and his health, for all he could do, was never robust; and he died at last with half his work, as it seemed, unachieved, at an age when many men are but just beginning to feel the reality of their powers. But geniuses before him have died younger than he, and left imperishable names. He traveled much, taking long journeys and short, partly in quest of health, always with an eye for whatever was of picturesque and human interest. He saw this country as well as Europe, and he ended his travels in an island on the south Pacific, and lies buried there "under the wide and brilliant sky," as he wished to be. It was a complete and honorable life, in spite of its brevity; and it was long enough to give many thousand readers reason to respect and love him.

He won the favor of critics from the start. His "Inland Voyage" and "Travels with a Donkey" were received with cordial encouragement; and his "New Arabian Nights, first published serially in the London World, showed that a new charm had come into literature. "Treasure Island," concerning the composition and circumstances of which he

has left us some account, was his first story of adventure, and was admittedly based upon the models in that branch of literature; but it was as good as the best, and has ever since remained one of his most popular productions. It contains all the elements of a good story of action and suspense, and has withal a delightful flavor, a sympathetic quality, that belongs only to a few fortunate creations. The style is perfectly suited to the character and tone of the narrative; it is Stevenson's style, and yet it subtly differs from the styles of his other stories; for he had the rare faculty of setting his medium in tune with his theme. This faculty was again exemplified in his most famous story, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which is written in a homely, hushed phraseology, greatly enhancing its ghastly subject matter. The double life which exists in all of us was never more strikingly portrayed than in this realistic allegory or parable. It is a work of concentrated genius; but it was in a sense a jeu d'esprit, and Stevenson was not content to follow up the lead this opened to him, as lesser men would gladly have done. He had ambitions towards the historical novel; and in "Kidnapped," and its sequel, "David Balfour," he gave masterly illustrations of his power to make the past live again, and mingle harmoniously with the creations of his own imagination. He cultivated this vein in other fictions, not always with the same success, but never unworthily. Another side of his versatile power was shown in the volume of short tales called "The Merry Men," and still others in his pictures of Samoan life and character, and in his delightful verses for children. His last novel, left unfinished, was published after his death, with a conclusion by the English writer Quiller Couch.

Stevenson married an American woman, but left no children. In person he was slender and of sallow complexion, with singular dark eyes; his manner had an irresistible fascination, and his conversation was full of sparkle and substance. His death took place suddenly, in 1894, when he was four and forty years of age. He had much endeared himself to the natives of his island, to whose welfare he had devoted himself, and who gave him the title of Chief, and bore him to his grave on the mountain-top, overlooking the mighty

ocean which he had made the scene of more than one of his most effective tales.

THE TRANSFORMATION.

(From "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.")

TWELVE o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

"Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?" I asked.

He told me "Yes" by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull's eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set my eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and— last but not least-with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighborhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigor, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable: his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement-the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground

the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced mesomething seizing, surprising and revolting-this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to re-inforce it; so that to my interest in the man's nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.

"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.

Be

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. seated, if you please." And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my pre-occupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer me to muster.

"I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly enough. "What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood . . . " he paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria-"I understood a drawer . . ."

But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

"There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart; I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive