He will discourse with you of morals,
music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, medicine, mangold-wurzel,
with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and
felicity of utterance."

Along with this ready affluence of speech, the youth had what good
talkers often lack, viz., the patience to hearken to others.
Stevenson shone best in what he called a little committee of
talkers, though his father and he used to argue a question together
for days; but, in the Speculative, he had at first to be a listener.
A candid fellow-member says, "I cannot remember that Stevenson was
ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had
no power of debate; but his papers were successful." In one of his
essays, touching on this select assemblage, Louis sketches what the
editor of the History of the Speculative Society, just published,
calls "a little Dutch picture; it focuses in vivid colour the
associations which rise in the memory at the name of the Spec.--the
stately old room aglow with many candles, the books, the portraits,
the pious commemoration of the dead,--famous men and our fathers
that begat us." "Stevenson," 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; second, as a fellow
student in the University Law Classes; third, being called to the
Scottish Bar about the same time as a brother-in-law; and last, as a
friend with many interests in common. In the Speculative he spoke
frequently, and read some papers. We recognised his brilliancy, and
we delighted in his vivacity; but we misread the horoscope of his
future. We voted him a light horseman, lacking two essentials for
success--diligence and health. We wondered where he had got the
deftness and rhythm of his style, not knowing that the labour out of
which it was evoked was of itself sufficient to refute our estimate
of his powers of work. As to his health, we forgot behind that
slender, angular frame was not only a father's iron constitution and
a mother's nervous vitality, but his own cheerful spirit and