His stubborn tenacity of purpose
he owed to his antecedents. The Scot's inalienable prerogative of
pedigree exercised an influence over him, though he appeared as a
foreign ingraft upon his Scotch family tree. In his record of his
father's kinsfolk, A Family of Engineers, and in many of his essays,
he engages his readers' attention by confiding to them his own and
his forebears' history. "I am a rogue at egotism myself; and to be
plain, I have rarely or never liked any man who was not," he says.
This Benjamin of Edinburgh's literary sons, the youngest, not the
least, was born in the very middle of last century, 1850. This babe,
that was to do Edinburgh honour yet, had been named after his two
grandfathers, Robert Lewis. He was a mixture of both, the inevitable
result of their diverse qualities, which he inherited. The Robert (a
name he was seldom known by in his youth) was from the Stevenson
side. They were a race of men of sterling metal, who lit our
Northern Lights, and from the besieging sea wrung footholds for
harbours.
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