es at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the
mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly
done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual
land."

Yes, it is all very beautiful, and all very true. Stevenson himself,
like Caesar, received the death he wished for, and, whether in reason or
in passion, every soul among us would agree that death in the midst of
life is the most desirable end. And yet--and yet--we hardly know how it
is, but, as a matter of fact, we do not seek it, and when the thing
comes our way, we prefer, if possible, to walk in the opposite
direction. The Territorial may sing himself hoarse with his prayer to
fall like a soldier, but when the bullets begin to wail around him, it
is a thousand to one that he will duck his head. A man may be reasonably
convinced that, since he must die some day, and his reprieve cannot be
extended long, it is best to die in battle and shoot full-blooded into
the spiritual land; nevertheless, if the shadow of a rock gives some
shelter from the guns, he will crawl behind it. A few years ago there
was a great Oxford philosopher who, after lecturing all morning on the
beauty of being absorbed by death into the absolute and eternal, was
granted the opportunity of being wrecked on a lake in the afternoon, but
displayed no satisfaction at the immediate prospect of such absorption.

In the same way, despite our natural and reasonable desires for a death
like Mr. Tomkinson's, we still continue to speak, not only of sleeping
in our beds, but of dying in them, as one of the chief objects of a
virtuous and happy existence. The longest and most devotional part of
the Anglican Common Prayer contains a special petition entreating that
we may be delivered from the sudden death which we have all agreed is so
excellent a piece of fortune. That we are not set free from love of
living is shown by what Matthew Arnold called a bloodthirsty clinging to
life at a moment of crisis. I shall not forget the green terror on the
faces of all the men in a railway carriage when I accidentally set fire
to the train, nor have I found it really appetising to suspect even the
quickest poison in my soup. Instead of leaping gallantly into death
while the trumpets are still blowing, nearly every civilised man
deliberately plots out his existence so as to die, like Tolstoy's Ivan
Ilyitch, amid the pitiful