"From his Highland ancestors," says the QUARTERLY REVIEW, "Louis
drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and
possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which
has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein
figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again,
the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell
we see the world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb
of infectious terror."

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry
reappear and transform other strains, strangely the more remote
often being the strongest and most persistent and wonderful.

"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr
Baildon, "that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his
person, character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back
to the Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy. Stevenson thus
drew in Celtic strains from both sides - from the Balfours and the
Stevensons alike - and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often
far-removed fancies we have the finest and most effective witness
of it."

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the
inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct
contact and contrast in an article he wrote in THE DAILY CHRONICLE
on the appearance of the LETTERS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS.


"These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of