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 of love as
well as of fraternal hatred. The "Master" is studied, is polished
ad unguem; it is a whole in itself, it is a remarkably daring
attempt to write the tragedy, as, in "Waverley," Scott wrote the
romance, of Scotland about the time of the Forty-Five. With such a
predecessor and rival, Mr. Stevenson wisely leaves the pomps and
battles of the Forty-Five, its chivalry and gallantry, alone. He
shows us the seamy side: the intrigues, domestic and political; the
needy Irish adventurer with the Prince, a person whom Scott had not
studied. The book, if completely successful, would be Mr.
Stevenson's "Bride of Lammermoor." To be frank, I do not think it
completely successful--a victory all along the line. The obvious