fts! When nature is "so careless of the single life,"[22] why should
we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional
importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark
night in Sir Thomas Lucy's[23] preserves, the world would have wagged
on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the
corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of
the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative
all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of
limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our
earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no
great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco
is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are
neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take
it how you will, but the services of no single individual are
indispensable. Atlas[24] was just a gentleman with a protracted
nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into
a great fortune and thence into bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep
scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who
come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a
pin instead of a pyramid;[25] and fine young men who work themselves
into a decline,[26] and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by
the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny?
and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the
bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they
know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect
may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world
they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the
thought.

NOTES

This essay was first printed in the _Cornhill Magazine_, for July
1877, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 80-86. It was next published in the volume,
_Virginibus Puerisque_, in 1881. Although this book contains some of
the most admirable specimens of Stevenson's style, it did not have a
large sale, and it was not until 1887 that another edition Appeared.
The editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_ from 1871 to 1882 was Leslie
Stephen (1832-1904), whose kindness a