These inquiries are no doubt idle: but, once more, one may draw
attention to the way in which two men, so different in tastes and
fortune, neither, it would seem, with a very strong bent towards prose
fiction as the vehicle of his literary desires and accomplishments,
appear to have been forced, by the overpowering attraction and
popularity of the kind, to adopt the novel as their form of literature,
and to give the public, not what they wanted in the form which they
chose, but something at least made up in the form that the public
wanted, and disguised in the wrappers which the public were accustomed
to purchase.

The principal development of mid-nineteenth-century fiction had been, as
we have seen, in the direction of the novel _proper_--the
character-study of modern ordinary life. But, even as early as _Esmond_
and _Hypatia_, signs were not wanting that the romance, historical or
other, was not going to be content with the rather pale copies of Scott,
and the rococo-sentimental style of Bulwer, which had mainly occupied it
for the last quarter of a century. Still, though we have mentioned other
examples of the fifties and sixties, and have left ever so many more
unmentioned, it was certainly not as popular[27] as its rival till,
towards the end of the latter decade, Mr. Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_ gave
it a fresh hold on the public taste. Some ten years later again there
came to its aid a new recruit of very exceptional character, Mr. Robert
Louis Stevenson. He was a member of the famous family of light-house
engineers, and was educated for the Bar of Scotland, to which he was
actually called. But law was as little to his taste as engineering, and
he slowly gravitated towards literature--the slowness being due, not
merely to family opposition or to any other of the usual causes (though
some of these were at work), but to an intense and elaborate desire to
work himself out a style of his own by the process of "sedulously aping"