eral and pious education_. It was Sir Richard Steele
who made the phrase, in _The Tatler_, No. 49: "to love her (Lady
Elizabeth Hastings) was a liberal education."]

[Note 45: _Trait d'union_. The French expression simply means
"hyphen": literally, "mark of connection."]

[Note 46: _Malvolio_. The conceited but not wholly contemptible
character in _Twelfth Night_.]

[Note 47: _The Egoist_. _The Egoist_ (1879) is one of the best-known
novels of Mr. George Meredith, born 1828. It had been published only a
very short time before Stevenson wrote this essay, so he is commenting
on one of the "newest" books. Stevenson's enthusiasm for Meredith knew
no bounds, and he regarded the _Egoist_ and _Richard Feverel_ (1859),
as among the masterpieces of English literature. _Daniel Deronda_, the
last and by no means the best novel of George Eliot (1820-1880), had
appeared in 1876.]

V

A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process
itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a
book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our
mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable
of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent,
should run thence-forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and
the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured
pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so
closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period
of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and conversation, were
but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort
of incident, like a pig for truffles.[1] For my part, I liked a story
to begin with an old wayside inn where, "towards the close of the year
17--," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A
friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast[2] in a storm, with a ship
beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions
striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was
further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and
designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I
affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a
Jacobite[3] would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I can
still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane;
night and the coming of day are still related in my mind wit