Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson—for so the writer whom the world knows as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised—valued greatly this doctrine of heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his ancestry and antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and character. He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his forefathers, which made him desire to be, in his own widely differing life-work, as good a man as they.
