In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it "womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly" about the lifestyle. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier criticized what he perceived as the message in "Walden" that man should lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs. He said: "Thoreau's "Walden" is a capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish ... After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs". Author Edward Abbey criticized Thoreau's ideas and experiences at Walden in detail throughout his response to "Walden" called "Down the River with Thoreau", written in 1980.