ned Bret Harte's extraordinary
portrait of _Boonder_: M. Maeterlinck's essay on dogs: Richard Harding
Davis's _The Bar Sinister_: Jack London's _The Call of the Wild_: and
best of all, Alfred Ollivant's splendid story _Bob, Son of Battle_
(1898) which has every indication of becoming an English classic. It
is a pity that dogs cannot read.

[Note 1: _The morals of dog-kind_. Stevenson discusses this subject
again in his essay _Pulvis et Umbra_ (1888).]

[Note 2: _Who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his oven_.
Stevenson was so sympathetic by nature that once, seeing a man beating
a dog, he interfered, crying, "It's not your dog, it's God's dog." On
the subject of vivisection, however his biographer says: "It must be
laid to the credit of his reason and the firm balance of his judgment
that although vivisection was a subject he could not endure even to
have mentioned, yet, with all his imagination and sensibility, he
never ranged himself among the opponents of this method of inquiry,
provided, of course, it was limited, as in England, with the utmost
rigour possible."--Balfour's _Life_, II, 217. The two most powerful
opponents of vivisection among Stevenson's contemporaries were Ruskin
and Browning. The former resigned the Professorship of Poetry at
Oxford because vivisection was permitted at the University: and the
latter in two poems _Tray_ and _Arcades Ambo_ treated the
vivisectionists with contempt, implying that they were cowards. In
Bernard Shaw's clever novel _Cashel Byron's Profession_, The
prize-fighter maintains that his profession is more honorable than
that of a man who bakes dogs in an oven. This novel, by the way, which
he read in the winter of 1887-88, made an extraordinary impression on
Stevenson; he recognised its author's originality and cleverness
immediately, and was filled with curiosity as to what kind of person
this Shaw might be. "Tell me more of the inimitable author," he cried.
It is a pity that Stevenson did not live to see the vogue of Shaw as a
dramatist, for the latter's early novels produced practically no
impression on the public. See Stevenson's highly entertaining letter
to William Archer, _Letters_, II, 107.]

[Note 3: "_Trailing clouds of glory_." _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.]

[Note 4: _The leading