Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

THOMAS STEVENSON
of his public generosity ; his private was equally un-
strained. The Church of Scotland, of which he held
the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and to
which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often
by his time and money ; and though, from a morbid
sense of his own unworthiness, he would never
consent to be an office-bearer, his advice was often
sought, and he served the Church on many com-
mittees. What he perhaps valued highest in his
work were his contributions to the defence of Chris-
tianity ; one of which, in particular, was praised by
Hutchison Stirling and reprinted at the request of
Professor Crawford.
His sense of his own unworthiness I have called
morbid ; morbid, too, were his sense of the fleeting-
ness of life and his concern for death. He had never
accepted the conditions of man's life or his own
character ; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged
with the Celtic melancholy. Cases of conscience
were sometimes grievous to him, and that delicate
employment of a scientific witness cost him many
qualms. But he found respite from these trouble-
some humours in his work, in his lifelong study of
natural science, in the society of those he loved, and
in his daily walks, which now would carry him far
into the country with some congenial friend, and
now keep him dangling about the town from one old
book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaint-
ance with every dog that passed. His talk, com-
pounded of so much sterling sense and so much
freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt,
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