Robert Louis Stevenson

1928. G.K. Chesterton was a journalist, poet, novelist, playwright, debater, and Catholic apologist in the early twentieth century. When Stevenson first appeared, Sir Edmund Gosse, England's leading literary critic, wrote: I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort of hyperbole, the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are avenged at last...It is and always since his death has been impossible for me to write anything which went below the surface of R.L.S. I loved him, and still love him, too tenderly to analyze him. But you, who have the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him, have taken the task into your strong competent hands. You could not have done it better. The latest survivor, the only survivor, of his little early circle of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart.