1911] Rohort Louis Stevenson, 33 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 

 Friday, February 10, 1911. 



His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, K.G. P.O. D.C.L. 

 LL.D. F.E.S., President, in the Chair. 



Sir Sidney Colvin, M.A. D.Litt., 

 Keeper of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. 



Robert Louis Steve?ison. 



At the beginning of August 1873 — that is between thirty-seven and 

 thirty-eight years ago — I remember it as if it were yesterday — I 

 landed from a Great Eastern train at a Httle country station in 

 Suffolk, and Avas met on the platform by a slender youth in a velvet 

 coat and straw hat, who walked up with me to the house where he 

 was staying and where I had come to stay. I was then a somewhat 

 juvenile professor at Cambridge ; the house was Cockfield Rectory, 

 near Bury St. Edmunds ; the host was my much older colleague, 

 Professor Churchill Babington, of amiable and learned memory ; the 

 hostess was his wife, a grand-daughter of the Rev. Lewis Balfour, 

 of Colinton, Midlothian ; the youth was her young cousin from 

 Edinburgh. Louis Stevenson, whom I then saw for the first time. 

 Another guest in the house had written advising me to come if I 

 could before the youth went away, as he seemed a fine young spirit 

 and she was sure I should find him interesting. Interesting he was 

 with a vengeance. The next few days and evenings were spent 

 revelling in a bath — a flood — how shall I say ? under an illuminated 

 and rainbow-tinted cataract of talk such as I never experienced before, 

 nor since, except in the same company. Perhaps I may mention 

 parenthetically that I was not unused to the presence and ways of 

 genius. I had had the luck, as little more than a child, to receive 

 di-awing lessons from Ruskin, Ruskin the golden-mouthed, and cake 

 and sherry — which I was much better able to assimilate — ^from his 

 mother ; and at the time I speak of was a close intimate in the circles 

 of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, impressive personalities and inspiring 

 companions both of them. As to Burne-Jones especially, many of 

 you here present must remember the abounding gaiety and imagina- 

 tion and knowledge, tlie charm and classic purity of his beautiful 

 and caressing talk. W. K. Clifford again, the great mathematician — 

 some of you, I am sure, can conjure up in memory his muscular 

 Socratic face and candid eyes, anl how he would hold his friends 

 hour after hour, while in his small quiet voice, and in words almost 

 of one syllable for simplicity, he made the abstractions of speculative 

 physics and of metaphysics as thrilling as a fairy tale and as easy as 

 Vol. XX. (No. 105) d 



