ng essential to the world's knowledge of his
character and appreciation of his genius. What is essential has been
said, once for all, by Sir Sidney Colvin in "Notes and Introductions" to
R. L. S.'s "Letters to His Family and Friends." I can but contribute the
personal views of one who knew, loved, and esteemed his junior that is
already a classic; but who never was of the inner circle of his
intimates. We shared, however, a common appreciation of his genius, for
he was not so dull as to suppose, or so absurd as to pretend to suppose,
that much of his work was not excellent. His tale "Thrawn Janet" "is
good," he says in a letter, with less vigour than but with as much truth
as Thackeray exclaiming "that's genius," when he describes Becky's
admiration of Rawdon's treatment of Lord Steyne, in the affray in Curzon
Street. About the work of other men and novelists, or poets, we were
almost invariably of the same mind; we were of one mind about the great
Charles Gordon. "He was filled," too, "with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc,"
says his biographer, "a devotion, and also a cool headed admiration,
which he never lost." In a letter he quotes Byron as having said that
Jeanne "was a fanatical strumpet," and he cries shame on the noble
poet. He projected an essay on the Blessed Maid, which is not in "the
veniable part of things lost."

Thus we were so much of the same sentiments, in so many ways, that I can
hope to speak with sympathy, if not always with complete understanding,
of Stevenson. Like a true Scot, he was interested in his ancestry, his
heredity; regarding Robert Fergusson, the young Scottish poet, who died
so young, in an asylum, as his spiritual forefather, and hoping to
attach himself to a branch of the Royal Clan Alpine, the MacGregors, as
the root of the Stevensons. Of Fergusson, he had, in early youth, the
waywardness, the liking for taverns and tavern talk, the half-rueful
appreciation of the old closes and wynds of Old Edinburgh, a touch of
the recklessness and more than all the pictorial power which, in
Fergusson, Burns so magnanimously admired.

But genealogical research shows that Stevenson drew nothing from the
dispossessed MacGregors, a clan greatly wronged, from Robert Bruce's
day, and greatly given to wronging others. Alan Breck did not like "the
Gregara," apart from their courage, and in Alan's day they were not
consistent walkers.

Stevenson, as far as one can learn, had no Celtic blood; none, at least,