[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 distinction. Those who know dogs will fully agree with Stevenson here.]
[Note 5: The faults of the dog. All lovers of dogs will by no means agree with Stevenson in his enumeration of canine sins.]
[Note 6: Montaigne's "je ne sais quoi de généreux." A bit of generosity. Montaigne's Essays (1580) had an enormous influence on Stevenson, as they have had on nearly all literary men for three hundred years. See his article in this volume, Books Which Save Influenced Me, and the discussion of the "personal essay" in our general Introduction.]
[Note 7: Sir Willoughby Patterne. Again a character in Meredith's Egoist. See our Note 47 of Chapter IV above.]
[Note 8: Hans Christian Andersen. A Danish writer of prodigious popularity: born 1805, died 1875. His books were translated into many languages. The "memoirs" Stevenson refers to, were called The Story of My Life, in which the author brought the narrative only so far as 1847: it was, however, finished by another hand. He is well known to juvenile readers by his Stories for Children.]
[Note 9: Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. For a reversion to type, where the plate-licker goes back to hunting, see Mr. London's powerful story, The Call of the Wild. … The "Rubicon" was a small stream separating Cisalpine Gaul from Italy. Caesar crossed it in 49 B. C, thus taking a decisive step in deliberately advancing into Italy. "Plutarch, in his life of Caesar, makes quite a dramatic scene out of the crossing of the Rubicon. Caesar does not even mention it."—B. Perrin's ed. of Caesar's Civil War, p. 142.]
[Note 10: The law in their members. Romans, VII, 23. "But I see another law in my members.">[