Sc. 4.)
_Barabbas_ was the robber who was released at the time of the trial of
Christ.... _William Hazlitt_ (1778-1830), the well-known essayist,
published in 1830 the _Conversations_ of _James Northcote_
(1746-1831). Northcote was an artist and writer, who had been an
assistant in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Stevenson projected a
_Life of Hazlitt_, but later abandoned the undertaking. (_Life,_ I,
230.)]

[Note 20: _The quality of mercy_. See Portia's wonderful speech in the
_Merchant of Venice_, Act IV, Scene I.]

[Note 21: _Joan of Arc_. The famous inspired French peasant girl, who
led the armies of her king to victory, and who was burned at Rouen in
1431. She was variously regarded as a harlot and a saint. In
Shakspere's historical plays, she is represented in the basest manner,
from conventional motives of English patriotism. Voltaire's scandalous
work, _La Pucelle_, and Schiller's noble _Jungfrau von Orleans_ make
an instructive contrast. She has been the subject of many dramas and
works of poetry and fiction. Her latest prominent admirer is Mark
Twain, whose historical romance _Joan of Arc_ is one of the most
carefully written, though not one of the most characteristic of his
books.]

[Note 22: "_So careless of the single life_." See Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_, LV, where the poet discusses the pessimism caused by
regarding the apparent indifference of nature to the happiness of the
individual.

"Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life."]

[Note 23: _Shakespeare ... Sir Thomas Lucy_. The familiar tradition
that Shakspere as a boy was a poacher on the preserves of his
aristocratic neighbor, Sir Thomas Lucy. See Halliwell-Phillipps's
_Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_. In 1879, at the first
performance of _As You Like It_ at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, the
deer brought on the stage in Act IV, Scene 2, had been shot that very
morning by H.S. Lucy, Esq., of Charlecote Park, a descendant of the
owner of the herd traditionally attacked by the future dramatist.]

[Note 24: _Atlas_. In mythology, the leader of the Titans, who fought
the Gods, and was condemned by Zeus to carry the weight of the vault
of heaven on his head and hands. In the sixteenth century the name
Atlas was given to a collection of maps by Mercator, probably because
a picture of Atlas had been commonly placed on the title-pages o