Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/405

 9* S. IV. Nov. 25, W.] 449 NOTES AND QUERIES. and gynks [ed. 1564, Chynes and Chynkes] of closely ioynyd bourdes." Chaeles J. Bullock. gUsallantous. NOTES ON BOOKS, &o. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Edited by Sidney Colvin. 2 vols. (Methuen & Co.) Stevenson's fame as essayist, novelistTwe might almost say dramatist and poet—is established upon a secure foundation. To his many claims upon con- sideration and admiration he will not add that built upon his merits as a letter-writer. His letters have neither the exquisite literary style nor the pleasant gossiping charm characteristic of the masters, conscious or unconscious, of epistolary art. They supply few and inexact details of his personal surroundings, and do not abound in passages of descriptive beauty, though such are to be encoun- tered. It must not be supposed because of these shortcomings that the letters are without value or interest, or the book in which they appear is to be lightly dismissed. We hold, on the contrary, the volumes before us to constitute one of the best books of the year, and we think the contents indis- pensable to a proper knowledge of one of the most artistic and stimulating of writers and one of the most sensitive of beings. We have for the present, at least, if not definitely, to accept the introduction and the explanatory passages which occur in the course of the book in place of the sustained bio- graphy we had anticipated. So far as we can estimate, Mr. Colvin's chief task, which has been that of selecting from a large mass of materials, has been judiciously and sympathetically executed. To speak with absolute authority on the Bubject it would be necessary to know how much has been omitted, and for what reason it does not appear. Personally we are disposed to hold that, with the Vailima letters, the present correspondence is all that can be needed. Some judgments upon indi- viduals have doubtless been held back with good cause ; but Stevenson is seen to highest advantage in some of his rare incursions into ltolitics, such as, for' instance, his wail over the desertion and death of Gordon. So far as possible—for Steven- son, like many other men who should know better, was chary as regards dates—the letters are chronological in sequence. Stevenson s chief correspondents, besides his parents and other relatives, are Mr. Colvin, Mr. Henley (with whom he frequently collaborated, and whom he con- stantly addressed as "dear lad"), Mr. Gosse, and Mr. Archer, with Mr. James Payn, Mr. Lang, Mr. Henry James, and, in later years, Mr. Barne and Mr. Crockett. His intimacies had obviously been made in the Savile Club, a popular and social gathering of professors, pundits, and writers. His letters depict a life of severe struggle and labour, long unremunerative. His ill health he keeps as far as possible in the background, disliking to be regarded as an invalid. In a characteristic Sassage, quoted by Mr. Colvin in his intro- uction, he says: To me the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my handker- chief are accidents ; they do not colour my view of life ; and I should think myself a tritler and in bad taste if I introduced the world to these unimportant privacies." With regard to financial difficulties he was, though naturally unexpansive, less strictly reticent. He bewails in 1880, when in San Francisco, having to drop from a fifty- cent to a twenty-five-cent dinner, and having to limit his entire daily expenditure in food and drink to a shilling and tenpence halfpenny. Three years later, when he had written some of his best work, was married, and was living at La Solitude, Hyeres, he says that for the first time his income has much passed three hundred pounds. Subsequently, when, with a sort of irony too common in the case of writers, affluence has come too late to do more than bring comfort to declining days, he seems to have been rather embarrassed by the sums he received, a thing also not unknown with the more sensitive among the followers of literature. It is pleasant to learn, though it was to have been expected, that Steven- son was loyal to the extreme in money matters, and that, having contracted to supply a daily newspaper with articles at no excessive rate of remuneration, he refused to accept the full amount tendered, inasmuch as illness had prevented him from giving what he considered to be his best work. There are very many opinions, estimates, judg- ments, which, if space permitted, we should like to quote. What Mr. Colvin says we take to be fully true, that the correspondence now given aids his friends to recall the man and his fine and stimulat- ing talk. Accident so arranged matters that our own meetings with Stevenson were neither frequent nor intimate, and that we never came under the spell, acknowledgedly great, of his conversation. Ihat it was pregnant and delightful we gather from these volumes, which others besides nis chosen friends will value. It is pleasant to congratulate Mr. Colvin on his share in the task. The pub- lishers, moreover, have issued the letters in most attractive guise, and the book will be handled reverently and lovingly by the bibliophile as an almost ideal specimen of the art of book production. Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie, Knight. By John Willcock, M.A., B.D., Lerwick. (Edin- burgh, Oliphant & Co.) "Crank" as he was, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie occupies, on the strength of his transla- tion of Rabelais, a conspicuous niche in English literary history. His original works—such of them as survived the disaster at Worcester, when three large trunkfuls, containing one hundred separate books, were after the battle, in which Urquhart took part, ravaged by the Cromwellian soldiers, who used them for the purpose of lighting their pipes—have been collected and reprinted tor the Maitland Club, the editor, Thomas Maitland, being animated, apparently, by a spirit of patriotism rather than of literary appreciation. How far the loss of the Urquhart MSS. may be regarded as a parallel to that brought about by Warburton's cook is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps, on the whole, their destruction was, so far as Urquhart is concerned, a blessing in disguise. Had they all survived, he might have been buried beneath them. It may safely be presumed that no influence of nationality or kindred taste could have induced Maitland to reprint such a lot. For one thing, at least, we may be thankful. The Rabelais was not among the contents of the trunks. Had that great work perished in lighting the Cromwellian pipes, it would have been a loss such as we shudder to con-