PENTLAND RISING - a pamphlet in size and a piece of fine work -
which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a high price.
He had made himself thoroughly familiar with all the odd old corners of Edinburgh - John Knox's haunts and so on, all which he has turned to account in essays, descriptions and in stories -
especially in CATRIONA.When a mere youth at school, as he tells us himself, he had little or no desire to carry off prizes and do just as other boys did; he was always wishing to observe, and to see, and try things for himself - was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something of an IDLER, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply.He was applying them rightly, though not in their way.It is not only in his APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as in his essay on A
COLLEGE MAGAZINE, where he says, "I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!"
When he went to College it was still the same - he tells us in the funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned "his face was not familiar to him"! He fared very differently when, afterwards his father, eager that he should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin.
He still stuck to his old courses - wandering about, and, in sheltered corners, writing in the open air, and was not present in class more than a dozen times.When the session was ended he went up to try for a certificate from Fleeming Jenkin."No, no, Mr Stevenson," said the Professor; "I might give it in a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you have not kept my classes."
And the most characteristic thing - honourable to both men - is to come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man's sketch of the elder.He learned from Professor Fleeming Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously, more of the HUMANIORES, than consciously he did of engineering.A friend of mine, who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours, to which R.L.Stevenson's mother belonged, recalls, as we have seen, his acting in the private theatricals that were got up by the Professor, and adds, "He was then a very handsome fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir Charles Pomander, and essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter Teazle," which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such parts splendidly as well as looked them.
LONGMAN'S MAGAZINE, immediately after his death, published the following poem, which took a very pathetic touch from the circumstances of its appearance - the more that, while it imaginatively and finely commemorated these days of truant wanderings, it showed the ruling passion for home and the old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not unnigh to death:
"The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
Far set in fields and woods, the town I see Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, Cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort Beflagg'd.About, on seaward drooping hills, New folds of city glitter.Last, the Forth Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles, And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns, There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
The sea bombards their founded towers; the night Thrills pierced with their strong lamps.The artificers, One after one, here in this grated cell, Where the rain erases and the rust consumes, Fell upon lasting silence.Continents And continental oceans intervene;
A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, Environs and confines their wandering child In vain.The voice of generations dead Summons me, sitting distant, to arise, My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, And all mutation over, stretch me down In that denoted city of the dead."
