Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 3

was
also a keen Conservative and a loving member of the Established
Church of Scotland. He was warmly beloved and his society was
greatly sought after by his friends; a voyage of inspection with him on
his tours round the coast was much appreciated. On one occasion Sir
Walter Scott made one of the party which accompanied him. Mr Robert
Stevenson died in July 1850, a few months before the birth of his
grandson, Robert Louis.
That this grandson held in high esteem the deeds and sterling qualities
of his grandfather is amply proved by his Samoan Letters to Mr Sydney
Colvin, published in 1895. In many of them he speaks of the history of
his family, which he intended to write, and into which he evidently felt
that he could put his best work. Alas! like so much that the brave spirit
and the busy brain planned, it was not to be, and the writer passed to
his rest without leaving behind him a full record of the workers who
had made his name famous.[1]
Mr Alan, Mr David, and Mr Thomas Stevenson worthily handed on the
traditions of their father, and in its second generation the lustre of the
great engineering family shone undimmed; while now the sons of Alan
Stevenson maintain the reputation of their forefathers, and the
Stevenson name is still one to conjure with wherever their saving lights

shine out across the sea.
Mr Thomas Stevenson served under his brother Alan in building the
famous lighthouse of 'Skerryvore,' and with his brother David he built
'The Chickens,' 'Dhu Heartach,' and many 'shore lights' and harbours.
He was a notable engineer, widely known and greatly honoured at
home and abroad, besides being a very typical Scotsman.
When one thinks of his grand rugged face, and remembers how the
stern eyes used to light up with humour and soften with tenderness, as
their glance fell on his wife and his son, one realises what a very
perfect picture of such a character in its outward sternness and its
inward gentleness, lies in those lines of Mr William Watson's, in which
he speaks of
'The fierceness that from tenderness is never far.'
Mr Stevenson's broad shoulders, his massive head, his powerful face,
reminded one of that enduring grey Scotch stone from which he and his
ancestors raised round all our coasts, their lighthouses and harbours.
Strong, grey, silent, these solid blocks resist winds and waves, and so
one felt would that powerful reticent nature stand steadfast in life's
battle, a tower of strength to those who trusted him. Like his own
'Beacon Lights,' on cliff and headland brilliant gleams of humour bright
gems of genius flashed out now and then from the silence. One felt too
that safe as the ships in his splendid harbours, would rest family and
friends in the strong yet loving heart that could hold secure all that it
valued through the tests and changes of time and the conflicts of
varying thoughts and opposing opinions. A man of strong prejudices, a
man too of varying moods, Mr Stevenson knew what it was at times to
endure hours of depression, to suffer from an almost morbidly religious
conscience, but he always kept a courageous hold on life and found the
best cure for a shadowed soul lay in constant and varied work.
The charming dedication of Familiar Studies of Men and Books is a
delightful tribute from the gifted son to the strength and nobility of his
father's character.

Highly favoured in his paternal heredity Mr R. L. Stevenson was no
less fortunate in his mother and his mother's family.
If strength and force of intellect characterised Mr Thomas Stevenson,
his wife, Margaret Balfour, had no less powerful an individuality; in
beauty of person, in grace of manner, in the brilliance of a quick and
flashing feminine intelligence--that was deep as well as bright--she was
a fitting helpmate for her husband, and the very mother to sympathise
with and encourage a son whose genius showed itself in quaint sayings,
in dainty ways, and in chivalrous thoughts almost from his infancy.
Mrs Stevenson was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr Lewis
Balfour, from 1823 to 1860 minister of Colinton, and of Henrietta Scott
Smith, daughter of the minister of Galston. There had been thirteen
children in the manse of Colinton, and father and mother had made of
the picturesque old house a home in truth as well as in name. Many of
these children survived long enough, two of them indeed are still living,
to carry the sacred traditions of that happy home out into a world where
they made honourable positions for themselves.
After the death of the mother her place was taken by her daughter Jane,
that aunt of whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote