Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

Id. PLAIN, 2d. COLOURED
was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt ; the original
of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype
of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from
Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan
Wild, pi. 1. *This is mastering me,' as Whitman
cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am 1 ?
what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my
Skelt has made them ? He stamped himself upon
my immaturity. The world was plain before I
knew him, a poor penny world ; but soon it was all
coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to
see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little
faded. If I visit a bold scene in nature, Skelt
would have been bolder; there had been certainly
a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree — that
set piece — I seem to miss it in the foreground.
Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering,
obtrusive and infantile art, I seem to have learned
the very spirit of my life's enjoyment ; met there the
shadows of the characters I was to read about and
love in a late future ; got the romance of Der Frei-
schutz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty
Formes ; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters
with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I
might enact all novels and romances ; and took
from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming
pleasure. Reader — and yourself?
A word of moral : it appears that B. Pollock,
late J. Redington, No. 73 Hoxton Street, not only
publishes twenty- three of these old stage favourites,
but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest
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