Selected Essays Of Robert Louis Stevenson

needy knife-grinder, an allusion to George Canning's famous skit.

Hume (1711-1776), the famous philosopher and historian.'
Jeffrey and Dr. Johnson criticized his style as not English but
French.

Malyolio, in Twelfth Night.

Egoist, see p. 134 supra, and for Daniel Deronda, the priggish
and immaculate hero of George Eliot's novel, p. 136 supra.

XII
RANDOM MEMORIES—

THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER

A description of incidents in Stevenson's journey in company
with his father along the coast of Scotland in 1868. Thomas :
Stevenson was at the time engaged on his one unsuccessful under-
taking—the breakwater at Wick Harbour, afterwards abandoned
(see ' Thomas Stevenson ' in Memories and Portraits}.

Anstmther, a small town on the coast of Fife. Tennant's Anster
Fair (1812) is a mock-heroic poem in the metre of Childe Harold,
humorously describing a Scotch wedding.

travellers, etc.., all technical terms in masonry. A traveller is a
movable crane ; a header, stone laid end-on in a wall; rubble,
rough stone ; ashlar, polished stone used for facing ; pierres perdues,
hidden stones for foundations ; string-course, a projecting horizontal
line of stones.

Lews, from the island of Lewis in the Hebrides.

proscenium, stage.

eldritch, weird.

Powl9 Paul, the ' apostle of the Gentiles,' supra p. 135.

Star of Hades. The god Hermes, the conductor of souls to Hades*
(Psychopompos).

Coeytus, in Greek mythology, the * river of wailing ' in Hell.
In Homer, the ghosts are pale, shadowy forms, clinging together
and * gibbering like a flock of bats.' II. xvi. 856. Od. xxiv.
6. Cf. Plato Rep. in.

Eustaehian tubes, small tubes at the back of the ear.

neophyte, novice.

multitudinous seas. Macbeth, n. ii. 62.

Skerry, crag.

Pharos, lighthouse.

Meg Merrllies, in Guy Manner ing.

Yetturini, coachmen.

Virgil's tomb, near Naples.

lordly evangelist. See the end of the essay on The Coast of
F^e.

Spanish grandee, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, wrecked off Wick
after the defeat of the Armada