"The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We
chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its
technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,'
and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its
forerunner, 'Tom Sawyer.'"
...."He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh
with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to
'Silverado Squatters'.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic
... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs."
_Brander Matthews._
"No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest
of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true
lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is
most unceasingly inspired by '_an unextinguishable zest in technical
successes_' and has also most constantly remembered that '_The end of all
art is to please_.'"
_M. G. Van Rensselaer._
"In the years I knew him, if Stevenson expressed much interest in
children, it was mainly for the sake of their fathers and mothers: but
that after a while he began to take a very great delight in summoning back
to his clear recollection the panic fears and adventurous pleasure of his
own early youth, thus becoming, in his portraiture of himself, the
consummate painter of one species of child. But his relation to other
children was shy and gently defiant; it would have exhausted him to play
with them; but he looked forward to a time when they should be old enough
to talk to him."
_Edmund Gosse._