with the pen of an angel."
(_Letters_, I, 141.) Editions of _Clarissa_ are not so scarce now as
they were thirty years ago; several have appeared within the last few
years.... _Vautrin_ is one of the most remarkable characters in
several novels of Balzac; see especially _Pere Goriot_ (1834) ...
_Steenie Steenson_ in Scott's novel _Redgauntlet_ (1824).]

[Note 10: _No human being, etc_. Stevenson loved action in novels, and
was impatient, as many readers are, when long-drawn descriptions of
scenery were introduced. Furthermore, the love for wild scenery has
become as fashionable as the love for music; the result being a very
general hypocrisy in assumed ecstatic raptures.]

[Note 11: _You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all_. Every
Scotchman is a born theologian. Franklin says in his _Autobiography_,
"I had caught this by reading my father's books of dispute on
Religion. Persons of good sense, I have since observed seldom fall
into it, except lawyers, university men, and generally men of all
sorts who have been bred at Edinburgh." (Chap. I.)]

[Note 12: _A court of love_. A mediaeval institution of chivalry,
where questions of knight-errantry, constancy in love, etc., were
discussed and for the time being, decided.]

[Note 13: _Spring-Heel'd Jack_. This is Stevenson's cousin "Bob,"
Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900), an artist and later
Professor of Fine Arts at University College, Liverpool. He was one of
the best conversationalists in England. Stevenson said of him,

"My cousin Bob, ... is the man likest and most unlike to me that I
have ever met.... What was specially his, and genuine, was his
faculty for turning over a subject in conversation. There was an
insane lucidity in his conclusions; a singular, humorous eloquence
in his language, and a power of method, bringing the whole of life
into the focus of the subject under hand; none of which I have ever
heard equalled or even approached by any other talker." (Balfour's
_Life of Stevenson_, I, 103. For further remarks on the cousin, see
note to page 104 of the _Life_.)]

[Note 14: _From Shakespeare to Kant, from Kant to Major Dyngwell_.
Immanuel Kant, the foremost philosopher of the eighteenth century,
born at Koenigsberg in 1724, died 1804. His greatest work, the
_Critique of Pure Reason_ (_Kritick der reinen Vernunft_, 1781),
produced about the same revolutionary effect on metaphysics as that
produced by Copernicus in astrono