[Note 12:  Job ... Walt Whitman.  The book of Job is usually regarded as the most poetical work in the Bible, even exceeding Psalms and Isaiah in its splendid imaginative language and extraordinary figures of speech.  For a literary study of it, the student is recommended to Professor Moulton’s edition.  Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet of mediaeval times, who became known to English readers through the beautiful paraphrase of some of his stanzas by Edward Fitzgerald, in 1859.  If any one will take the trouble to compare a literal prose rendering of Omar (as in N.H.  Dole’s variorum edition) with the version by Fitzgerald, he will speedily see that the power and beauty of the poem is due far more to the skill of “Old Fitz” than to the original.  Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was perhaps the foremost writer of English prose in the nineteenth century.  Although a consummate literary artist, he was even more influential as a moral tonic.  His philosophy and that of Omar represent as wide a contrast as could easily be found.  Walt Whitman, the strange American poet (1819-1892), whose famous Leaves of Grass (1855) excited an uproar in America, and gave the author a much more serious reputation in Europe.  Stevenson’s interest in him was genuine, but not partisan, and his essay, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman (The New Quarterly Magazine, Oct. 1878), is perhaps the most judicious appreciation in the English language of this singular poet.  Job, Omar Khayyam, Carlyle and Whitman, taken together, certainly give a curious collection of what the Germans call Weltanschauungen.]

[Note 13:  A vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams.  For constant comparisons of life with a vapour or a show, see Quarles’s Emblems (1635), though these conventional figures may be found thousands of times in general literature.  The latter part of the sentence refers to the Tempest, Act IV, Scene I.

              “We are such stuff
  As dreams are made on, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep.”]

[Note 14:  Permanent Possibility of Sensation.  “Matter then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation.”—­John Stuart Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, Vol.  I. Chap.  XI.]

[Note 15:  Like the Commander’s Statue.  In the familiar story of Don Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander’s invitation to supper.  For treatments of this theme, see Moliere’s play Don Juan, or Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni; see also Bernard Shaw’s paradoxical play, Man and Superman.... We have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock.  It is possible that Stevenson’s words here are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber’s letter to the novelist Richardson.  This unabashed old profligate celebrated the Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the apostle of domestic virtue in the following strain:  “Though Death has been cooling his heels at my door these three weeks, I have not had time to see him.  The daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while.  If you have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death to come another day.”]