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His attitude toward death is shown here, and is further shown in his little paper AEs Triplex, in which he successfully vindicates his generation from the charge of cowardice in the face of death. Stevenson's two distinguishing characteristics were his courage and his determination to be happy as the right way of making other people happy.
The end came suddenly, exactly as he would have wished it, and precisely as he had unconsciously predicted in the last radiant, triumphant sentences of his great essay, Aes Triplex. He had been at work on a novel, St. Ives, one of his poorer efforts, and whose composition grew steadily more and more distasteful, until he found that he was actually writing against the grain.
It was thought that Sumner's friend, who had been supported by him as a candidate for high office, who shared many of his political ideas and feelings, who was his intimate associate, his fellow-townsman, his companion in scholarship and cultivation, his sympathetic co-laborer in many ways, had been accounted and dealt with as the ally of an enemy, and that the shaft which struck to the heart of the sensitive envoy had glanced from the 'aes triplex' of the obdurate Senator.
Copies of this edition are now eagerly sought by book-collectors; five of them were taken by the Robert Louis Stevenson Club of Yale College, consisting of a few undergraduates of the class of 1898, who subscribed fifty dollars to the fund. Stevenson's cheerful optimism was constantly shadowed by the thought of Death, and in Aes Triplex he gives free rein to his fancies on this universal theme.
The conduct of these brave seamen, quite ignorant of what so apparently dark a future might have in reserve for them, but who with wonderful faith had "placed their affairs in the hands of God," may be always proposed as an example even to the sailors of the present day. It may well be said that they had really in their heart the æs triplex of which Horace speaks.
In 1792 similar changes were made in Delaware. In 1789 Georgia added the upper house to its legislature, and about the same time in several states the governor's powers were enlarged. Thus the various state governments were repetitions on a small scale of what was then supposed to be the triplex government of England, with its King, Lords, and Commons.
"Funny, isn't it, sweetheart, how little we know what to expect? Just think how surprised I would have been, when I left this room, if I had been told that I would have a husband before I got back to it!" Breckenridge's first thought was for his precious triplex automatic chronometer, which he found, of course, "way off" six and three-tenths seconds fast.
Then they swung round wrenching the shares from the triplex furrow, and for a few wild minutes man and terrified beast fought for the mastery.
My armour is the aes triplex of a clear conscience, and a mind nourished by the precepts of philosophy. `For men, says Epictetus, `are disturbed not by things themselves, but by their opinions or thoughts concerning those things. And again, `whosoever will be free, let him not desire or dread that which it is in the power of others either to deny or inflict: otherwise, he is a slave. And of all such gifts as are dependent on the caprice of fortune or of men, I have long ago learned to say, with Horace who, however, is too wavering in his philosophy, vacillating between the precepts of Zeno and the less worthy maxims of Epicurus, and attempting, as we say, `duabus sellis sedere' concerning such accidents, I say, with the pregnant brevity of the poet
My Catholic friend, I knew, always carried a bottle of holy water in his pocket, and at my entreaty forbore for the moment to exorcise. The legal gentleman, though a "writer" himself, was not at all convinced about the phenomena, as was perhaps natural, seeing the exceedingly bad company to which it professed to relegate him. As for me, my scepticism was to me robur et æs triplex.
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