In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the title Virginibus Puerisque, Mr Stevenson discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom, and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.
That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never far away from the man whose paper on Ordered South is like the bravely repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on El Dorado proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often to be its own reward.
Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the writing of four plays which were privately printed, Deacon Brodie in 1880, Beau Austin in 1884, Admiral Guinea in 1884, and Robert Macaire in 1885—the whole being finally published in volume form in an edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. Beau Austin was acted in 1890 at The Haymarket, and quite recently Admiral Guinea has been played with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a great success on the stage.
In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays called Across the Plains, the note of pathos which appears now and then in Virginibus Puerisque is even more forcibly struck. The writer is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant reading, and Across the Plains and The Old and New Pacific Capitals give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.
In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father in The Pharos round the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.
Not the least pleasant of his volumes of Essays is that called Memories and Portraits, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to
'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse,
Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.'
In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be.