Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
must have stood in the first company with the six
names of my continual Hterary intimates. To these
six, incongruous as they seem, I have long been
faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death.
I have never read the whole of Montaigne, but I
do not like to be long without reading some of him,
and my delight in what I do read never lessens.
Of Shakespeare I have read all but Richard III.,
Henry VI., Titus Andronicus, and All's Well that
Ends Well; and these, having already made all
suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never
read — to make up for which unfaithfulness I could
read much of the rest for ever. Of Moliere —
surely the next greatest name of Christendom — I
could tell a very similar story ; but in a little
corner of a little essay these princes are too much
out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and
pass on. How often I have read Guy Mannering,
Rob Roy, or Redgauntlet, I have no means of guess-
ing, having begun young. But it is either four or
five times that I have read The Egoist, and either
five or six that I have read the Vicomte de Brage-
lonne.
Some, who would accept the others, may wonder
that I should have spent so much of this brief life
of ours over a work so little famous as the last.
And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my
own devotion, but the coldness of the world.
My acquaintance with the Vicomte began, somewhat
indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had
the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert
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