"Cockshot is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready made or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it on the minute. 'Let me see,' he will say, 'give me a moment, I should have some theory for that.'"
But for serious matters this manner would never do, and accordingly we find that, when the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into English as early as the time of James I.
Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his smaller works to his physicians:—
"There are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule.... I forget as many as I remember and I ask both to pardon me, these for silence, those for inadequate speech."
After finishing off this dedication to his satisfaction, Stevenson turns over the page and writes a NOTE in the language of two and one-half centuries later. He is now the elegant littérateur of the last generation—one would say James Russell Lowell:—
"The human conscience has fled of late the troublesome domain of conduct for what I should have supposed to be the less congenial field of art: there she may now be said to rage, and with special severity in all that touches dialect, so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of mispronunciation."
But in this last extract we are still three degrees away from what can be done in the line of gentility and delicate effeteness of style. Take the following, which is the very peach-blow of courtesy:—
"But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no business in the arts. If he be not frugal he steers directly for that last tragic scene of le vieux saltimbanque; if he be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he should attain to—or preserve—distinction in the arts," etc.
Now the very next essay to this is a sort of intoned voluntary played upon the more sombre emotions.
"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes."