“Seriously, do you like to repose? Ye gods, I hate it … And
when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has fallen in love with stagnation, I
can only say to him You will never be a Pirate! … After all boyhood aspirations
and youth’s immoral daydreams you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in
your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die …
To confess plainly, I had intended to spend my life (or any
leisure I might have from Piracy upon the high seas) as the leader of a great
horde of irregular cavalry, devastating whole valleys. I can still, looking
back, see myself in many favourite attitudes; signaling for a boat from my
pirate ship with a pocket-handkerchief, I at the jetty end, and one or two of
my bold blades keeping the crowd at bay; or else turning in the saddle to look
back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at the hand gallop
up the road out of the burning valley; this last by moonlight …”
Robert Louis Stevenson, in a letter to William Cosmo
Monkhouse, 1884
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