STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1162, 24 June 1911, Page 9

STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS.

Louis Stevenson's education was, at best, a desultory affair. Constantly kept back by illnesses—taken away, for his mother's health aud his own, to the Kiviera and the South of England-he was always having private tutors for short periods, or going to one after another of the private schools in Edinburgh, where he made no particular mark, though everybody teemed to like him. Mrs. Stevenson used to say she believed his masters liked talking to him better than coaching him. Books were to this boy schoolmasters and playmates in one. Those were happy days with "Gummy" in the Heriot How nursery, over "Cassell's Family Paper" and the Reverend Mr. M'Cheyne! And he would listen for hours while his mother read aloud to him, though he would not himself have chosen "Macbeth" on a long, wet, windy, depressing Edinburgh day. In "A'Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" he has introduced the world to the dear old stationer's shop in Leith Walk, whcie ho spent his first pucknt-iuoiie.v on bluing the little paper volumes of "Shell's Juvenile Drama; and it is. wonderful what hauls he made (the Waverley Novels among them) in his father's library in Heriot Row—that austere place where "it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident." French, he seems to have-learn-ed on the Riviera. At thirteen he was deep in Dumas; and after this Charles Lamb and Herbert Spencer; Hazlitt, Montakue, Horace, and Pepys; John Bunyan, Shakespeare by the way, Burns, Smollett, and Fielding; Keats, Heine, and Wordsworth; Dcfoc and Sir Thomas Browne; Hawthorne and Walt Whitman— surely, the world of literature was opened .to Louis Stevenson!

And meantime ho was himself a man of letters. At six he dictated. I a his mother a History of Moses. At thirteen he had written a series of blood-curdling romances, with .tfujtnfiif jjfor&iilary fii parenthesis: "But'T forgW'-fd fell' you that I had made love to a beautiful girl even in one day, and from all I knew she loved-me." 'And Hid" crude'little paper on the "Pentland Rising"—originally a story, too, but altered into historic, form to please his father—was published anonymously when he was only sixteen!

• What is called "Edinburgh society" never understood Louis Stevenson. It saw in him merely "a queer lad iu a velvet coat," who let his hair grow uncomfortably long, disliked dinners- and dances, was always alternating between Balzac and the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and made his father and mother wretched, with his religious difficulties and his odd Bohemian ways. There were, of course, one or two exceptions. Professor Flecming Jenkin. Hie new Professor of Engineering, had recently arrived from London; arid Mrs. .Tonkin, paying her "return call" on Mrs. Stevenson in Heriot Row one winter afternoon in 1868, had discovered that this boy of eighteen, who looked sixteen, was a poet—a "young Heme with the Scottish accent." . And from that day Louis Stevenson owed some of his happiest hours in Edinburgh to Professor and Mrs. Jenkin's sympathy and kirrllv hospitality. But, on the whole, "Edinburgh society" did not in the least appreciate Louis Sfeven-on; it could not understand why Lighthouse Stevenson's son should pprsistyif'y give it th? cold should»r, and prefer wandering abaut in odd pines, among oueer ceninanv. in the dirtiest parts of the Old Tewiu

But to Louis Stevenson, and to thnw who lov-d.. him. thos-» were the 'Vld and bitterly unhanpv days of my life." —"Cornhill Magazine."