unning wide through the heather," where David
"took his last look of Kirk Essendean, the trees about the manse, and the
big rowans in the kirkyard, where his father and mother lay." Perfectly
Scotch, too, is the mouldering, empty house of the Miser, with the
stamped leather on the walls. And the Miser is as good as a Scotch
Trapbois, till he becomes homicidal, and then one fails to recognise him
unless he is a little mad, like that other frantic uncle in "The Merry
Men." The scenes on the ship, with the boy who is murdered, are better--I
think more real--than the scenes of piratical life in "The Master of
Ballantrae." The fight in the Round House, even if it were exaggerated,
would be redeemed by the "Song of the Sword of Alan." As to Alan Breck
himself, with his valour and vanity, his good heart, his good conceit of
himself, his fantastic loyalty, he is absolutely worthy of the hand that
drew Callum Bey and the Dougal creature. It is just possible that we
see, in "Kidnapped," more signs of determined labour, more evidence of
touches and retouches, than in "Rob Roy." In nothing else which it
attempts is it inferior; in mastery of landscape, as in the scene of the
lonely rock in a dry and thirsty land, it is unsurpassed. If there are
signs of laboured handling on Alan, there are none in the sketches of
Cluny and of Rob Roy's son, the piper. What a generous artist is Alan!
"Robin Oig," he said, when it was done, "ye are a great piper. I am not
fit to blow in the same kingdom with you. Body of me! ye have mair music
in your sporran than I have in my head."

"Kidnapped," we said, is a fragment. It ends anywhere, or nowhere, as if
the pen had dropped from a weary hand. Thus, and for other reasons, one
cannot pretend to set what is not really a whole against such a rounded
whole as "Rob Roy," or against "The Legend of Montrose." Again,
"Kidnapped" is a novel without a woman in it: not here is Di Vernon, not
here is Helen McGregor. David Balfour is the pragmatic Lowlander; he
does not bear comparison, excellent as he is, with Baillie Nicol Jarvie,
the humorous Lowlander: he does not live in the memory like the immortal
Baillie. It is as a series of scenes and sketches that "Kidnapped" is
unmatched among Mr. Stevenson's works.

In "The Master of Ballantrae" Mr. Stevenson makes a gallant effort to
enter what I have ventured to call the capital of his kingdom. He does
introduce a woman, and confronts the problems