years after his death such a place as this in the general
regard, and who has desired that a selection from his letters shall be
made public, the word 'selection' has evidently to be given a pretty
liberal interpretation. Readers, it must be supposed, will scarce be
content without the opportunity of a fairly ample intercourse with such
a man as he was accustomed to reveal himself in writing to his
familiars. In choosing from among the material before me" (I still quote
from the Introduction of 1899), "I have used the best discretion that I
could. Stevenson's feelings and relations throughout life were in almost
all directions so warm and kindly, that very little had to be suppressed
from fear of giving pain.[2] On the other hand, he drew people towards
him with so much confidence and affection, and met their openness with
so much of his own, that an editor could not but feel the frequent risk
of inviting readers to trespass too far on purely private affairs and
feelings, including those of the living. This was a point upon which in
his lifetime he felt strongly. That excellent critic, Mr. Walter
Raleigh, has noticed, as one of the merits of Stevenson's personal
essays and accounts of travel, that few men have written more or more
attractively of themselves without ever taking the public unduly into
familiarity or overstepping proper bounds of reticence. Public prying
into private lives, the propagation of gossip by the press, and printing
of private letters during the writer's lifetime, were things he hated.
Once, indeed, he very superfluously gave himself a dangerous cold, by
dancing before a bonfire in his garden at the news of a 'society' editor
having been committed to prison; and the only approach to a difference
he ever had with one of his lifelong friends arose from the publication,
without permission, of one of his letters written during his first
Pacific voyage.

"How far, then, must I regard his instructions about publication as
authorising me to go after his death beyond the limits which he had been
so careful in observing and desiring others to observe in life? How much
may now fairly become public of that which had been held sacred and
hitherto private among his friends? To cut out all that is strictly
personal and intimate were to leave his story untold and half the charm
of his character unrevealed: to put in too much were to break all bonds
of that privacy which he so carefully regarded while he lived. I