BERANGER, PIERRE JEAN DE

by Robert Louis Stevenson Stevenson was still quite a young writer, the works that were to ensure his lasting fame still well in the future, when he was commissioned by the editor of the Ninth Edition (1875-89) to write a biography of his countryman and fellow poet Robert Burns. The editor rejected Stevenson's submission, and Stevenson later conceded the point: "To say truth, I had, I fancy, an exaggerated idea of the gravity of an encyclopedia and wished to give mere bones, and to make no statement that should seem even warm." He obviously learned his lesson, and provided far more than mere bones in his second effort, a biography of yet another poet. Beranger, Pierre Jean de