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 of life. Each writer in turn carried on a lively and suggestive conversation with him; but he cares little for putting their remarks into the framework of an abstract theory. He does not profess to form any judgment of Mr. Spencer's system; he is content to find him 'bracing, manly, and honest.' He feels the ethical stimulant. He is attracted by all writers whose words have the ring of genuine first-hand conviction; who reveal their own souls—with a good many defects, it may be, but at least bring one into contact with a bit of real unsophisticated human nature. He can forgive Walt Whitman's want of form, and rejoice in the 'barbaric yawp' which utterly rejects and denounces effete conventionalism. What he hates above all is the Pharisee. 'Respectability,' he says in Lay Morals, is 'the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on man.' He is, that is to say, a Bohemian; but he is a Bohemian who is tempered for good, or (as some critics would say) for bad, by morality and the lesser catechism. He sympathises with Whitman's combination of egoism and altruism. 'Morality has been ceremoniously extruded at the door (by Whitman) only to be brought in again by the window.' So Stevenson's Bohemianism