[Note 16: Belvedere of Commonsense. Belvedere is an Italian word, which referred originally to a place of observation on the top of a house, from which one might enjoy an extensive prospect. A portion of the Vatican in Rome is called the Belvedere, thus lending this name to the famous statue of Apollo, which stands there. On the continent, anything like a summer-house is often called a Belvedere. One of the most interesting localities which bears this name is the Belvedere just outside of Weimar, in Germany, where Goethe used to act in his own dramas in the open air theatre.]
[Note 17: The plangent wars. Plangent is from the Latin plango, to strike, to beat. Stevenson's use of the word is rather unusual in English.]
[Note 18: The old shepherd telling his tale.. See Milton, L'Allegro:—
"And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale."
"Tells his tale" means of course "counts his sheep," not "tells a story." The old use of the word "tell" for "count" survives to-day in the word "teller" in a parliamentary assemblage, or in a bank.]
[Note 19: Colonel Newcome … Fred Bayham … Mr. Barnes … Falstaff … Barabbases … Hazlitt … Northcote. Colonel Newcome, the great character in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1854). Fred Bayham and Barnes Newcome are persons in the same story. One of the best essays on Falstaff is the one printed in the first series of Mr. Augustine Birrell's Obiter Dicta (1884). This essay would have pleased Thackeray. One of the finest epitaphs in literature is that pronounced over the supposedly dead body of Falstaff by Prince Hal—"I could have better spared a better man." (King Henry IV, Part I, Act V, 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.">[