human secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that is
to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to
receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the
same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate
part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature: - and
all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a
needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity
tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of
which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be
abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this
monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who
looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool
who looks for the Deserving Poor.'


An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force
of a natural law to the pathos of OLD MORTALITY, that essay in
which Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early
friend, who 'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who
condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought
as for a kingdom.' The whole description, down to the marvellous
quotation from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign
passages of modern literature; the pathos of it is pure and
elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the
legions commanded by


'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord,
That all the misbelieving and black Horde