E. Blantyre Simpson

“ It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile and whimsical a nature, apparently so ready to be diverted from the main high-road by a desire to explore any brambly lane, had in him the deliberate goal-winning gait of the tortoise. ”

“ When that alien-looking advocate with unsuspected gifts had cast off the wig and gown, and had busied himself for years filling up reams of paper with his thoughts and studies on people, places, and things, sightseers going through the Courts would be shown this unused box, which remained so empty while those around it of his old rivals at the Spec, were full, as they were scaling the heights which lead to titles and the Bench.
Stevenson wrote of Edinburgh and her climate in a carping spirit, nevertheless he accorded due praise to her unsurpassed beauty. ”

“ It would have been interesting to see, if Stevenson had taken it into his elfin-locked head to learn to shine in debate, and, instead of incubating a budding Scott, as he said, "the Spec." had trained an able advocate, if the glamour of his personality would have extended to the judges, and made him, with his well-chosen words, a successful pleader. The boards of the Parliament House were too well worn a road for so tramp-blooded a man. ”

“ It hurt the son to the quick to deal his "dearest" a staggering blow, and decline to follow his hereditary profession. Louis had tried to be an engineer. He liked the swinging, smoking seas on which they struggled for a site for sheltering masonry. As in the case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. ”

“ It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. ”

“ This mulish blindness puzzled the boy, and when he grew up, he opened the eyes, and illumined by his work and his example the dreary-hearted who wasted their opportunities, not seeing the number of beautiful things which made the world into a royal pleasance. ”

“ Repose he never tasted of, for his zest in life, his adventurous inclination to explore, his insatiable curiosity, kept him ever moving at topmost speed. To understand the mainspring which affected the man's character—the machinery that supplied him with an inexhaustible nerve force and vitality—Mr Colvin explains, "besides humour, which kept wholesome laughter always ready at his lips, was a perfectly warm, loyal, and tender heart, which, through all his experiments and agitations, made the law of kindness the one ruling law of his life." ”

“ Louis sat to an Italian, Count Nerli, in Samoa; but in this last portrait he looks painfully haggard, reminding us of his own words, "the practice of letters is miserably harassing." Because of the too brilliant light elsewhere in Vailima, he was painted in a room which was close, and the air fatigued him. While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's death, it had remained unsold. ”

“ With tuneful words he persuaded those who plodded with dusty feet along the high-road to pause for a while and saunter among the greener fields of earth, and through the stimulating courage that shone through every chapter he wrote, he, like his sires, "the ready and the strong of word," has, by his works, left lights to shine upon the paths of men. ”

“ The mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, when asked to inscribe a motto on a guest list, wrote:—
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be happy as kings."
"That," she said, "includes the whole gospel of R. L. S." These lines are certainly a concise statement of the spirit in which her son undertook to expound the benefits to be derived from "performing our petty round of irritating concerns and duties with laughter and kind faces." Before he could walk steadily, it had been discovered he was heavily handicapped by the burden of ill-health. ”

“ Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student," as he calls himself, enjoyed "its atmosphere of good-fellowship, its vivid and varied interests, its traditions of honourable labour and success." ”

“ He did not realise, as an American says, "If you look as if you had slept in your clothes most men will jump to the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your shoulders." In a corridor in the Parliament House, where the men called to the Bar keep open-mouthed boxes for documents to be slipped in, one bore on its plate the inscription R. L. Stevenson. ”

“ Little store of bodily vigour had Robert Lewis; but with his buoyant, enthusiastic, inquisitive spirit he accomplished a strong man's task, "weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest." This treasured only son, worshipped by his doting parents and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, who was a second mother to him, reports himself to have been a good child. He also says he had a covenanting childhood. In the mid-Victorian era, a stricter discipline reigned over nurseries in Scotland's capital than now. ”

“ Except at the "dear old Spec.," he mixed little his equals in Edinburgh. As a writer in Blackwood points out, at the period he had grown into swallow-tails, Edinburgh was by no means devoid of intellectual company, which even a famed Robert Louis need not have despised. But he abhorred constraint and codes of rules. He was a born adventurer and practical experimentist in life, and he explains he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and womenkind. ”

“ Having burned his immature efforts when he was following his own "private determination to be an author," when ostensibly studying engineering, there are but two pamphlets, printed in his boyhood, which are not written when he had acquired his finished style. Louis' last creation, Weir of Hermiston, he himself thought was his master-piece, and he was always his own surest and severest critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. ”

“ Mr Dickson goes on to say, "is the most famous man of letters who has belonged to the Society since Scott. No more interesting personality has ever been of our number, and no one has in the public eye been more closely identified with the Society." "Oh, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in Edinburgh," Louis exclaims, and twice he was President of the "worshipful society."
A contemporary of Stevenson's, Sheriff Guthrie, wrote in 1899, "I knew Louis first in the Speculative Society ”

“ In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening. "Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well." But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of damp heat. ”

“ The publishers desire to announce that it is their purpose to comprise in this series a collection of little books uniform in general style and appearance to the present volume and having for their subjects men and women, whose work and influence, in whatever field of literature or art was their chosen one, may be said to faintly reflect the spirit or tendencies of cultivated thought at the present time. ”