ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful
attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has
drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none
of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself,
has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply.

Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr
Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland
and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate
and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies
and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch
skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with
the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who,
even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them
with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no
unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6]

In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the
noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny
islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his
ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart

'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.'

A Scot of whom Edinburgh and Scotland are justly proud, he was a man
whose life and faith did credit to the stern religion and the old
traditions of his covenanting forefathers, and although, like so many
men and women of earnest minds and broad culture in the present day, he
early left behind him much of the narrowness of churches and of creeds,
he held closely to 'the one thing needful,' a humble and a trusting
belief in God that filled all his soul with strength and patience, and
gave to him that marvellous sympathy with humanity which made him a
power among men, whether they were the learned and the cultured, or
simple children of nature like the Samoans, who so truly understood and
loved him.

The books undoubtedly are great, but the man is greater; and it is not
only as a writer of no small renown that he will be revered and
remembered but as a man among men whose patience and courage gave to his
too short life a pathos and a value. Among his friends he was beloved in
a manner quite unique, he had a peculiar place of his own in their
regard. By the younger school of writers, whose work he so fully and so
ge