Page:Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Hitherto unpublished, 1921.djvu/28

 known poetry, I had no notion that what I then had before me did not represent even half of his accomplished work in that category of literature. There was then, for example, little ground for believing that the strictly lyrical impulse was strong in him from the beginning; that he had ever very seriously essayed the old French forms of verse in which his contemporaries like Lang and Dobson were so fluent, or that he had shown more than an amateurish interest in the work of such a poet as Martial.

It is true, of course, that his discussions of Villon and of Charles of Orleans might, without Mr. Graham Balfour's aid, have led one to suspect dabbling in French forms, and it is possibly true that for at least a considerable portion of his later life the writing of verse was, to quote the biographer just named, "almost always a resource of illness or of convalescence." He appears, according to the same authority, to have written "Requiem" when recovering from the drastic illness at Hyeres in the early eighties, and in a letter to his mother he confirmed in a measure the view just cited, when he declared, "I do [ 22 ]