little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time
Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless
disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any
great bulk of work: and the merit of what he did varied. Latterly he
took to a teasing process of collaboration, which his sincerest admirers
could have willingly spared. But his last completed book, _Catriona_
(1893), seemed to some judges of at least considerable experience the
best thing he had yet done, especially in one all-important
respect--that he here conquered either an unwillingness to attempt or an
inability to achieve the portraiture of feminine character, which his
books had previously displayed. The general opinion, too, was that the
unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ (1897), which he left a fragment at his
death, was the best and strongest thing he had done, while it showed in
particular a distinct relinquishment, for something freer and more
spontaneous, of the effective but also rather affected and decidedly
laboured style in which he had hitherto written. For us, however, his
style is of less importance than the fact that he applied it almost
wholly to the carrying out of that rejuvenescence of romance of which we
have been speaking, and which may be taken, as anybody pleases, either
for a mere alternative to the domestic novel or as a definite revolt
against it. It was speedily taken up by writers mostly still living, and
so not to be dwelt on now.

Very late in the century the genius of Mr. William Morris turned from
verse to prose tale-telling in a series of romances which caught the
fancy neither of the public nor of the critics as a whole, but which
seem to some whom the gods have made not quite uncritical to be, if
rightly taken, of much accomplishment, and of almost more promise and
suggestion. These, seven or eight in number, from _The House of the
Wulfings_ (1889) to _The Sundering Flood_, published after the author's