Stevenson, ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR, as novelist, essayist, and miscellaneous writer master of a perfect English style, was born at Edinburgh, Nov. 13, 1850. His father and grandfather (Robert Stevenson, q.v.) were famous lighthouse engineers, and he was at first intended for the family profession. But he soon gave up the idea and turned to law, and, after the qualifying course of study at Edinburgh University, was duly called to the Scottish bar. Soon, however, he found his true calling in the craft of letters, and quickly forced his way into the front rank of contemporary writers by the sheer excellence of his style. Some experiences which supplied impulse and material were leisurely journeys through north-eastern France by canoe and on foot, a voyage across the Atlantic in the steerage of an emigrant ship, and the after-journey across the continent in an emigrant train, and, lastly, a lengthened residence in Samoa, where he settled for health's sake in 1889. From his childhood he had written without ceasing, and drunk deep at the richest wells of English undefiled, and from the first his articles in the Cornhill and elsewhere showed a distinct individuality and a style perfect if not plus-quam-perfect. His earliest books were An Inland Voyage (1878); Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1878); Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); Virginibus Puerisque, and other Papers (1881); and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). The last two contain his best essays, the latter volume those on Charles of Orleans, Pepys, Burns, Villon, &c. In his New Arabian
Nights (2 vols. 1882)—a collection of grotesque romances—he opened a new shaft into his wealth of imaginativeness. More important was his next successor, Treasure Island (1883), a complete success in a literary kind the secret of which seemed to have been lost. Hardly less excellent was Kidnapped (1886); but The Master of Ballantrae (1889), The Black Arrow (1888), and The Wrecker (Scribner, 1891-92) fall into lower rank. In 1885 appeared Mr Stevenson's delightful collection, A Child's Garden of Verse, which stands almost by itself as an imaginative realisation of the make-believe and dramatising imagination habitual to childhood. Later volumes of verse were the less notable Underwoods (1887) and Ballads (1891), which, always clever, usually fall short of the one thing needful in poetry. The Silverado Squatters dates from 1884, Across the Plains from 1892. The rococo Prince Otto (1885) has been pronounced the crux for testing the true Stevensonian; the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) compelled the most exacting critics to commend its ingenuity and exquisite art. The Merry Men (1887) is a collection which contains some of his most delicate work; in Memories and Portraits the interest was largely autobiographical. The Island Nights' Entertainments and Catrina (a continuation of Kidnapped) mark the year 1893, The Suicide Club 1894. With his wife he wrote The Dynamiter (1885), and with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne he wrote The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb Tide (1894). He defended Father Damien in 1890, and showed his versatility by a memoir of Professor Fleeming Jenkin (1887), his Footnote to History (on Samoan politics, 1892), and his sketches of his father and of his forbears. His health had long been shattered, and he died suddenly on 3d December 1894, and was buried by his own desire on the top of a mountain behind his Samoan home of Vailima. The Vailima Letters thence (1895) were addressed to Mr Sidney Colvin. At his death he was the most conspicuous personality in English letters, and he had secured from all classes of readers an exceptional wealth of personal affection. Weir of Hermiston, an unfinished story, appeared in Cosmopolis in 1895; St Ives was published in the Pall Mall Magazine 1897. The 'Edinburgh Edition' of his works (1894-98) extends to 27 vols. See the Letters, edited by his literary executor, Mr Sidney Colvin (1899).
See W. Archer in Time for November 1885, Henry James in Partial Portraits (1888), and Andrew Lang in Essays in Little (1890).