ordinary, every-day, picturesque worthies of good, honest scoundrelism
and disreputableness is Sir Robert Louis Stevenson. You can afford
conscientiously to stuff ballot boxes in order that his election may be
secured as Poet Laureate of Rascals. Leaving out John Silver and Billy
Bones and Alan Breck, whom every privately shriven rascal of us simply
must honor and revere as giants of courage, cunning and controlled,
conscience, Stevenson turned from singles and pairs, and in "The Ebb
Tide," drove, by turns, tandem and abreast, a four-in-hand of scoundrels
so buoyant, natural, strong, and yet each so totally unlike the others,
that every honest novel reader may well be excused for shedding tears
when he reflects that the marvelous hand and heart that created them are
gone forever from the haunts of the interestingly wicked. No novelist
ever exposed the human nature of rascals as Stevenson did.

Now, lago was not a villain; he was a venomous toad, a scorpion, a
mad-dog, a poisonous plant in a fair meadow. There was nobody lago
loved, no weakness he concealed, no point of contact with any human
being. His sister was Pandora, his brother made the shirt of Nessus,
himself dealt in Black Plagues and the Leprosy. The old Serpent was
permitted to rise from his belly and walk upright on the tip of his tail
when he met Iago, as a demonstration of moral superiority. But think
of those three Babes-in-the-Wood villains, skipper Davis, the Yankee
swashbuckler and ship scuttler; Herrick, the dreamy poet, ruined by
commerce and early love, with his days of remorse and his days of
compensatary liquor; and Huish, the great-hearted Scotch ruffian, who
chafed at the conventional concealments of trade among pals and never
could--as a true Scotchman--understand why you should wait to use a
knife upon a victim when promptness lay in the club right at hand--think
of them sailing out of Honolulu harbor on the Farallone.