Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1884-05), “Old Mortality,” ch. 1, Longman’s Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 19
    (Source)

Collected in Memories and Portraits, ch. 3 (1887).

This appears to be the source of the otherwise-spurious Stevenson quotes referring to sitting down "at a banquet of consequences."