[Note 15: _Like the Commander's Statue_. In the familiar story of Don Juan, where the audacious rake accepts the Commander's invitation to supper. For treatments of this theme, see Molière's play _Don Juan_, or Mozart's opera _Don Giovanni_; see also Bernard Shaw's paradoxical play, _Man and Superman_.... _We have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock_. It is possible that Stevenson's words here are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to the novelist Richardson. This unabashed old profligate celebrated the Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the apostle of domestic virtue in the following strain: "Though Death has been cooling his heels at my door these three weeks, I have not had time to see him. The daily conversation of my friends has kept me so agreeably alive, that I have not passed my time better a great while. If you have a mind to make one of us, I will order Death to come another day."] [Note 16: _All the world over, and every hour_. He might truthfully have said, "every second."] [Note 17: _A mere bag's end, as the French say. A cul de sac._] [Note 18: _Our respected lexicographer ... Highland tour ... triple brass ... twenty-seven individual cups of tea._ Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary appeared in 1755. For his horror of death, his fondness for tea, and his Highland tour with Boswell, see the latter's _Life of Johnson_; consult the late Dr. Hill's admirable index in his edition of the _Life_.] [Note 19: _Mim-mouthed friends_. See J. Wright's _English Dialect Dictionary_. "Mim-mouthed" means "affectedly prim or proper in speech."] [Note 20: "_A peerage or Westminster Abbey!_" Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), the most famous admiral in England's naval history, who won the great battle of Trafalgar and lost his life in the moment of victory. Nelson was as ambitious as he was brave, and his cry that Stevenson quotes was characteristic.] [Note 21: _Tread down the nettle danger_. Hotspur's words in _King Henry IV_, Part I, Act II, Sc. 3. "Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."] [Note 22: _After Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course?_ Thackeray and Dickens, dying in 1863 and in 1870 respectively, left unfinished _Denis Duval_ and _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. Stevenson himself left unfinished what would in all probability have been his unquestioned masterpiece, _Weir of Hermiston_.] [Note 23: _All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work_. See Browning's inspiring poem, _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, XXIII, XXIV, XXV:-- "Not on the vulgar mass Called "work," must sentence pass, Things done, which took the eye and had the price; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: