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 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

HE most striking individuality in English letters of to-day has gone from us. The loss is the greater since one of the peculiar notes of his genius was its versatility and unexpectedness. You could never guess what Stevenson's next book was going to be about. It might be a footnote to history, a familiar study of men or of books, a mediæval romance, a new Arabian night, a talk about talking, a tale of Thule or a ballad of the South Seas, a nursery rhyme or a sympathetic study of old men. What might he not have given us if his years had stretched to the Psalmist's span?

But amid all the diversity of his work there was one common strain which made it all his and gave the individual note. Jeffrey wondered where Macaulay got that style of his; Stevenson has told us how he created the prose instrument which has done more than anything to break up the Macaulayesque 175