posititious histories of persons quite different from him-
self, and the objective, as we have learned to call it,
was the ideal to which he oftenest sacrificed.

The effect of it all none the less was such that his
Correspondence has only seemed to administer de-
lightfully a further push to a door already half open
and through which we enter with an extraordinary
failure of any sense of intrusion. We feel indeed that
we are living with him, but what is that but what we
were doing before? Through his Correspondence cer-
tainly the ego does, magnificently, shine -- which is
much the best thing that in any correspondence it can
ever do. But even the "Vailima Letters," published
by Mr. Sidney Colvin in 1895, had already both es-
tablished that and allayed our diffidence. "It came
over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine
to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and
a man could make some kind of book out of it without
much trouble. So, for God's sake, don't lose them."

Being on these terms with our author, and feeling as
if we had always been, we profit by freedoms that seem
but the consecration of intimacy. Not only have we
no sense of intrusion, but we are so prepared to pene-
trate further that when we come to limits we quite
feel as if the story were mutilated and the copy not
complete. There it is precisely that we seize the
secret of our tie. Of course it was personal, for how
did it operate in any connection whatever but to make
us live with him? We had lived with him in "Treasure
Island," in "Kidnapped" and in "Catriona," just as
we do, by the light of these posthumous volumes, in
the South Seas and at Vailima; and our present con-

-2-