story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best
passages in the book - the scenes in Paris, for instance - have no
business there at all. The story in KIDNAPPED and CATRIONA wanders
on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader
feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty in
leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James
Stewart. THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE is stamped with a magnificent
unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a
series of scattered episodes.

That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part
Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have
made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,'
is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and
benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort
or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this
character to the sublime of power.

But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be
apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much
of plot as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether
situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of
them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to
impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination
or contrast. The events that happen within the limits of one of
these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of
the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long
starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of
crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining
tropical lagoons in TREASURE ISLAND and THE EBB TIDE, the captivity