Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 28, 1898 - Appendix

ON HUMAN LIFE
with in these pages. The author hates you, Count; and
difficult as it may be to connect the idea of immortality —
or, in plain terms, of a sequel — with the paper and printer's
ink of which your humanity is made, it is yet more difficult
to foresee anything but punishment and pain for one who
is justly hateful in the eyes of his creator.' 1
' You take for granted many things that I shall not easily
be persuaded to allow,'' replied the villain. ' Do you really
so far deceive yourself in your imagination as to fancy that
the author is a friend to good ? Read ; read the book in
which you figure ; and you will soon disown such crude vul-
garities. Lelio is a good character ; yet only two chapters
ago we left him in a fine predicament. His old servant was
a model of the virtues, yet did he not miserably perish in
that ambuscade upon the road to Poitiers ? And as for the
family of the bankrupt merchant, how is it possible for greater
moral qualities to be alive with more irremediable misfortunes ?
And yet you continue to misrepresent an author to yourself,
as a deity devoted to virtue and inimical to vice ? Pray, if
you have no pride in your own intellectual credit for your-
self, spare at least the sensibilities of your associates."'
' The purposes of the serial story,"' answered the Priest, ' are,
doubtless for some wise reason, hidden from those who act in
it. To this limitation we must bow. But I ask every character
to observe narrowly his own personal relations to the author.
There, if nowhere else, we may glean some hint of his superior
designs. Now I am myself a mingled personage, liable to
doubts, to scruples, and to sudden revulsions of feeling; I
reason continually about life, and frequently the result of my
reasoning is to condemn or even to change my action. I am
now convinced, for example, that I did wrong in joining in
your plot against the innocent and most unfortunate Lelio.
I told you so, you will remember, in the chapter which has
just been concluded ; and though I do not know whether
you perceived the ardour and fluency with which I expressed
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