There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. – Spectator Blogs

My thanks to Bella Caledonia for republishing Robert Louis Stevenson’s splendid essay An Apology for Idlers on this the 162nd anniversary of that fine man’s birth. It is the grandest entertainment I’ve read today. Originally published in the July 1877 edition of the Cornhill Magazine it still bounces with life today. Among its many romping moments:

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, it “goes for” them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow.