these three weeks, I have not had time to see him. The daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while. If you have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death to come another day."

Page 49. All the world over, and every hour. He might truthfully have said, "every second."

Page 50. A mere bag's end, as the French say. A cul de

sac.

tour ...

Page 50. Our respected lexicographer ... Highland triple brass... twenty-seven individual cups of tea. Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary appeared in 1755. For his horror of death, his fondness for tea, and his Highland tour with Boswell, see the latter's Life of Johnson; consult the late Dr. Hill's admirable index in his edition of the Life.

Page 52. Mim-mouthed friends. See J. Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or proper in speech."

Page 52. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), the most famous admiral in England's naval history, who won the great battle of Trafalgar and lost his life in the moment of victory. Nelson was as ambitious as he was brave, and his cry that Stevenson quotes was characteristic.

Page 52. Tread down the nettle danger. Hotspur's words in King Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Sc. 3. “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."

Page 52. After Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Thackeray and Dickens, dying in 1863 and in 1870 respectively, left unfinished Denis Duval and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Stevenson himself left unfinished what would in all probability have been his unquestioned masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston.

Page 53. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work. See Browning's inspiring poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra, XXIII, XXIV, XXV:—

"Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work," must sentence pass,

Things done, which took the eye and had the price: O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."

Page 53. Whom the Gods love die young. "Quem di diligunt adolescens moritur."-Plautus, Bacchides, Act IV, Sc. 7.

Page 54. Trailing with him clouds of glory. This passage, from Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (1807), was a favorite one with Stevenson, and he quotes it several times in various essays.

IV

TALK AND TALKERS

I

16 Sir, we had a good talk."-JOHNSON.

"As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence."- FRANKLIN.

T

HERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel

in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative,

continually "in further search and progress;" while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linseywoolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. It cannot, even if it would, become merely æsthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same

degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of } friendship. It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counterassertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on