Memories and Portraits | Page 3

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Memories and Portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson. 1912 Chatto and
Windus edition. Scanned and proofed by David Price, email
[email protected]

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

NOTE
THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to
read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A
certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and
youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - taken
together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost
awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident;
I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by
the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead;
and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began
to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be
surprised at the occurrence.
My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the
person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him
better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and
cannot divide interests.
Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already
in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S, SCRIBNER, THE ENGLISH
ILLUSTRATED, THE MAGAZINE OF ART, THE
CONTEMPORARY REVIEW; three are here in print for the first time;

and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as a private
circulation.
R. L S.

CONTENTS
I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
III. OLD MORALITY IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE V. AN OLD
SCOTCH GARDENER VI. PASTORAL VII. THE MANSE VIII.
MEMORIES OF AN ISLET IX. THOMAS STEVENSON X. TALK
AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER XI. TALK AND TALKERS:
SECOND PAPER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS XIII. "A
PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED" XIV. A GOSSIP
ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE XVI.
A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE

CHAPTER I
. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
"This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't."
Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts
should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that
United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so
many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular
contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert,
from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when
we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England;
and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed
to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the
Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was
but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still
show in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last
Cornish- speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the
traveller through the most of North America, through the greater South
Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports

of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a
hundred varying stages of transition. You may go all over the States,
and - setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners,
negro, French, or Chinese - you shall scarce meet with so marked a
difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and
Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and
Aberdeen. Book English has gone round the world, but at home we still
preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and every county, in some parts
every dale, has its own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like
manner, local custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law,
linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN
IMPERIO, foreign