Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BRAWN AND CHARACTER When Robert Louis Stevenson was asked what lack in life caused him the keenest pain, he answered, " The feeling that I 'm not strong enough to resent an insult properly, — not strong enough to knock a man down." With civilization at a point where the resort to elemental weapons is practically obsolete, it might seem that there was something antiquated and unreal, more imaginary than genuine, in this complaint of the frail-bodied Stevenson; probably in all his life, as in the lives of most gentlemen nowadays, he was never confronted with the alternative of knocking a man down or accepting a wound to his pride. If the occasion ever arose and he had t6 charge to the feebleness of his body his failure to sustain his dignity, the recollection might indeed tinge him with bitterness; but it is difficult to believe that the gentle and lovable Stevenson argued from an actual experience of humiliation. Yet it is not alone the painful memories or the logical apprehensions of ill which awaken the most sensitive realization of defencelessness and fill the soul with the haunting dread of incompetence. From a clouded childhood such a distrust is usually derived, rather than from the isolated blunders or failures, however monumental, of later years. Stevenson, the petted and fragile child at home, went finally to school; and it hardly needs a biographer to tell us how the high-spirited, imaginative boy, who liked to shine, met with repression from the stalwart, obstinate young Scots. In their rough sports he was never a leader; that was mortification enough to one of his spirit; and it was not the full measure of his mortification. With his imperious outbursts, his flashing temper, his physical weakness, he afforded some of them rare sport.His school-days were miserab...