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"Suppose you were to be asked to write a complete account of a day at school. You would probably begin by saying you rose at a certain hour, dressed and came down to morning school. You would not think of telling how many buttons you had to fasten, nor how long you took to make a parting, nor how many steps you descended," Stevenson writes. "The youngest boy would have too much of what we call 'literary tact' to do that. Such a quantity of twaddling detail would simply bore the reader's head off." Gulli believes that the essay was written around 1881, when Stevenson was in his early 30s. He was likely working on "Treasure Island," published in 1883 and the book which gave us the dastardly Long John Silver, and he counted pirates among those presented falsely in fiction. "The famous buccaneers," as Stevenson called them, were not chivalrous adventurers, but "lubbers and swabs, and downright dunces." "If you read a true account of these rogues you would be thunderstruck. Again and again they try to cross the Atlantic
-- what hundreds of decent, respectable merchant skippers do successfully every month
-- and again and again they lose their way, cannot find the trade-winds, and, from sheer block-headedness, suffer the last extremities of thirst and hunger," he writes. "All this sort of matter, the pirate story people quietly leave out; because ... it would not go down with the reader."
[Associated
Press;
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