n the debates of the
Speculative Society, and in private dramatic performances, organized by
his senior and friend, Professor Fleeming Jenkin. To "dress up" in old
costumes always pleased him. He happened to praise the acting of a girl
of fourteen, who, in her family circle, said, "Perhaps when I am old,
like the lady in Ronsard, I will say 'R. L. Stevenson sang of me.'" His
gambols "with the wild Prince and Poins" are not unrecorded. These were
his Fergussonian years. Perhaps he might have expressed Burns's esteem
for the "class of men called black-guards," as far as their
unconventionality is concerned. He saw a great deal of life in many
varieties; like Scott in Liddesdale, "he was making himsel' a' the
time." With his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, Walter Ferrier, Mr. Charles
Baxter, and Sir Walter Simpson (a good golfer and not a bad bat), he
performed "acts of Libbelism," and discussed all things in the universe.
He was wildly gay, and profoundly serious, he had the earnestness of the
Covenanter in forming speculations more or less unorthodox. It is
needless to dwell on the strain caused by his theological ideals and
those of a loving but sternly Calvinistic sire, to whom his love was
ever loyal.

These things bred melancholy, of necessity, and melancholy was purged by
an almost unexampled interest, not in literature alone, but in the
technique of style, and the construction of sentences and periods. Few
of his confessions are better known than those on his apprenticeship in
style to the great authors of the past. He gave himself up to the
schools of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe,
Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, William Morris, and Obermann (De
Senancour).

This he did when he was aged about eighteen, when other lads are trying
to write Latin prose like Cicero, or Livy, or Tacitus (Tacitus is the
easiest to ape, in a way), and Latin verse like Ovid, or Horace, or
Virgil. This they do because it is "part of the curricoolum," as the
Scottish baronet said, of school and college. But I do not remember
anecdotes of other boys with a genius for English prose who set
themselves to acquire style before they deemed that they had anything in
particular to say.

In English essays at college a young fellow may be told by his tutor not
to imitate Carlyle or Macaulay: the attempt to repeat the tones of
Thackeray is most incident to youth. But to aim, like Stevenson while a
student of Edinburgh University