_INTRODUCTORY NOTE_
_Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-94), novelist, essayist, and
poet, was descended from a famous family of lighthouse builders. He
was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, and was intended for the ancestral
profession of engineer. Abandoning this, he tried law with no better
success, and finally devoted himself to his destined vocation of
letters._
_Stevenson began his career with the writing of essays, then issued two
charming volumes of humorous and contemplative travel, "An Inland
Voyage" and "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes"; then collected, in
his "New Arabian Nights" a number of fanciful short stories he had been
publishing in a magazine. In 1883 he first caught the attention of the
larger public with "Treasure Island," one of the best, and probably the
best written, boys' story in the language. His most sensational
success was "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; but a much
higher literary quality appears: in such novels as "The Master of
Ballantrae," "Kidnapped," and "Catriona," in which he to some extent
follows the tradition of Scott, with far greater finish of style, but
without Scott's fine spontaneity and unconsciousness. He published
also three small volumes of verse, some of it of great charm and
delicacy._
_Stevenson was essentially an artist in words. The modern desire for
subtlety of cadence and for the rendering of fine shades of expression
is seen in a high degree in all he wrote, and his work has the merits
and defects that accompany this extreme preoccupation with style. But
he had also great virtues of matter. He was a superb story-teller, an
acute and sensitive critic, a genial and whole-hearted lover of life.
In the essay on "Truth of Intercourse" will be found an example of his
gracious and tactful moralising; In "Samuel Pepys," a penetrating
interpretation of one of the most amazing pieces of self-revelation in
the annals of literature._