[Note 5:  Alexander is touched in a very delicate place.  Alluding to the famous interview between the young Alexander and the old Diogenes, which took place at Corinth about 330 B.C.  Alexander asked Diogenes in what way he could be of service to him, and the philosopher replied gruffly, “By standing out of my sunshine.”  As a young man Diogenes had been given to all excesses of dissipation; but he later went to the opposite extreme of asceticism, being one of the earliest and most striking illustrations of “plain living and high thinking.”  The debauchery of his youth and the privation and exposure of his old age did not deeply affect his hardy constitution, for he is said to have lived to the age of ninety.  In the charming play by the Elizabethan, John Lyly, A moste excellente Comedie of Alexander, Campaspe, and Diogenes (1584), the conversations between the man who has conquered the world and the man who has overcome the world are highly entertaining.]

[Note 6:  Where was the glory of having taken Rome.  This refers to the invasion by the Gauls about the year 389 B. C. A good account is given in T. Arnold’s History of Rome I, pp. 534 et seq.]

[Note 7:  Sent to Coventry.  The origin of this proverb, which means of course, “to ostracise,” probably dates back to 1647, when, according to Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion, VI, par. 83, Royalist prisoners were sent to the parliamentary stronghold of Coventry, in Warwickshire.]

[Note 8:  Montenegro ...  Richmond.  Montenegro is one of the smallest principalities in the world, about 3,550 square miles.  It is in the Balkan peninsula, to the east of the lower Adriatic, between Austro-Hungary and Turkey.  When Stevenson was writing this essay, 1876-77, Montenegro was the subject of much discussion, owing to the part she took in the Russo-Turkish war.  The year after this article was published (1878) Montenegro reached the coast of the Adriatic for the first time, and now has two tiny seaports.  Tennyson celebrated the hardy virtues of the inhabitants in his sonnet Montenegro, written in 1877.

  “O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
  Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
  Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.”

Richmond is on the river Thames, close to the city of London.]

[Note 9:  Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours. Stevenson here alludes to the oft-heard statement that the men who succeed in after life have generally been near the foot of their classes at school and college.  It is impossible to prove either the falsity or truth of so general a remark, but it is easier to point out men who have been successful both at school and in life, than to find sufficient evidence that school and college prizes prevent further triumphs.  Macaulay, who is noted by Stevenson as an exception, was precocious enough to arouse the fears rather than the hopes of his friends.  When he was four years old, he hurt his finger, and a lady inquiring politely as to whether the injured member was better, the infant replied gravely, “Thank you, Madam, the agony is abated.”]