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. His stubborn tenacity of purpose
he owed to his antecedents. The Scot's inalienable prerogative of
pedigree exercised an influence over him, though he appeared as a
foreign ingraft upon his Scotch family tree. In his record of his
father's kinsfolk, A Family of Engineers, and in many of his essays,
he engages his readers' attention by confiding to them his own and
his forebears' history. "I am a rogue at egotism myself; and to be
plain, I have rarely or never liked any man who was not," he says.

This Benjamin of Edinburgh's literary sons, the youngest, not the
least, was born in the very middle of last century, 1850. This babe,
that was to do Edinburgh honour yet, had been named after his two
grandfathers, Robert Lewis. He was a mixture of both, the inevitable
result of their diverse qualities, which he inherited. The Robert (a
name he was seldom known by in his youth) was from the Stevenson
side. They were a race of men of sterling metal, who lit our
Northern Lights, and from the besieging sea wrung footholds for
harbours. From them Robert Louis Stevenson inherited that tenacity
of purpose which made him write and rewrite chapters till his
phrases concisely expressed his meaning, and toilsomely labour till
his work was perfected. His minister grandfather he etched with the
"Old Manse." All his mother's people, the Balfours, were of a
sanguine, hopeful strain, retaining an elasticity of spirit which
never lessened under the burden of years. Stevenson writes of "that
wise youth, my uncle," who was a grey-bearded doctor when his nephew
thus referred to him. So from the daughter of the Herd of Men at
Colinton he inherited his perennial youthfulness. "He was ever the
spirit of boyhood," says Barrie, "tugging at the skirts of this old
world, and compelling it to come back and play."

It was well for the boy that his mother had gifted him with her
hopeful nature, for his father had Celtic traits in his character,
and was oppressed with a morbid sense of his own unworthiness. It is
Carlyle who vouches for the fact "that wondrous is the strength of
cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance."
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 wa