[Note 14:  From Shakespeare to Kant, from Kant to Major Dyngwell.  Immanuel Kant, the foremost philosopher of the eighteenth century, born at Koenigsberg in 1724, died 1804.  His greatest work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritick der reinen Vernunft, 1781), produced about the same revolutionary effect on metaphysics as that produced by Copernicus in astronomy, or by Darwin in natural science.... Major Dyngwell I know not.]

[Note 15:  Burly.  Burly is Stevenson’s friend, the poet William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903.  His sonnet on our author may be found in the introduction to this book.  Leslie Stephen introduced the two men on 13 Feb. 1875, when Henley was in the hospital, and a very close and intimate friendship began.  Henley’s personality was exceedingly robust, in contrast with his health, and in his writings and talk he delighted in shocking people.  His philosophy of life is seen clearly in his most characteristic poem: 

  “Out of the night that covers me,
    Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
  I thank whatever Gods may be
    For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance
    I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
  Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears
    Looms but the Horror of the shade,
  And yet the menace of the years
    Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
  I am the master of my fate: 
    I am the Captain of my soul.”

After the publication of Balfour’s Life of Stevenson (1901), Mr. Henley contributed to the Pall Mall Magazine in December of that year an article called R.L.S., which made a tremendous sensation.  It was regarded by many of Stevenson’s friends as a wanton assault on his private character.  Whether justified or not, it certainly damaged Henley more than the dead author.  For further accounts of the relations between the two men, see index to Balfour’s Life, under the title Henley.]

[Note 16:  Pistol has been out-Pistol’d.  The burlesque character in Shakspere’s King Henry IV and V.]

[Note 17:  Cockshot. (The Late Fleeming Jenkin.) As the note says, this was Professor Fleeming Jenkin, who died 12 June 1885.  He exercised a great influence over the younger man.  Stevenson paid the debt of gratitude he owed him by writing the Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, published first in America by Charles Scribner’s Sons, in 1887.]

[Note 18:  Synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer.  The English philosopher, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), whose many volumes in various fields of science and metaphysics were called by their author the Synthetic Philosophy.  His most popular book is First Principles (1862), which has exercised an enormous influence in the direction of agnosticism.  His Autobiography, two big volumes, was published in 1904, and fell rather flat.]