Familiar Studies of Men and Books, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1882), is a collection of essays, remarkable for a certain youthful originality and daring in the expression of opinion. “In truth,” the author writes, “these are but the readings of a literary vagrant. One book led to another, one study to another. The first was published with trepidation. Since no bones were broken, the second was launched with greater confidence. So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires in his own eyes a kind of roving judicial commission through the ages;… sets himself up to right the wrongs of universal history and criticism.” 1
This he does with his usual charm and gentleness, but not without exercising sturdy criticism, even at the risk of running full tilt against conventional opinion. In the essay on Thoreau he boldly intimates that the plain-living, high-thinking code of life, of which the Walden recluse was an embodiment, may lead a man dangerously near to the borderland of priggishness. He challenges Walt Whitman’s relations with the Muse of Poetry as illicit, but does full justice to the honest brain and the sweet heart back of the lumbering verse. For Villon, poet and scamp, he has no praise and little patience,—the scamp outweighing the poet.