bow and arrow, that they turn up superior noses at Stevenson, who merely consorted with thieves and harlots in the slums of Edinburgh and London, ran through the professions of engineering and law before he was twenty-five, explored the Scotch coast in a sailboat, canoed the Sambre and Oise, slept in a lonely bivouac à la belle étoile in the Cévennes, fled to San Francisco by emigrant train, ran away with a wife and family, camped on Mount St. Helena, chartered his own schooner, sailed the South Seas for three years, feasted with cannibal chiefs, refused to sleep with their wives, conspired with Kanaka kings, was threatened with deportation, planted a wilderness, governed a small tribe of savages and died in his boots?
If these lofty critical fellows hold that Stevenson's sheltered and coddled life starved and devitalized his romance, come, let us bring them to confession and require them to tell us what sort of dare-devil existence a really "modern" writer must live.
The field of battle to which he likened marriage as well as life was a field in which there was no headstrong conflict of ideal and practise, but a mere accommodation which a phrase could embody.
This is Mr. Swinnerton again. But where did he pick up that impression? Not, surely, from considering with any attention Stevenson's long heart-breaking fight for his own morality, his own religion, his own love choice, and his own profession, against the stubborn opposition of his parents and all the embattled forces of time, place and circumstances. Can't they see, these superior critics, that what they call a "toy," this romance of "Kidnapped," for example, with its
