collected by the editor. The narrative was written in a very ornate and
grandiloquent style, but the hero of the memoirs was so evidently a man
of remarkable character, enterprise and adventure, that I saw in the
few scattered bones of the story which he unfolded the skeleton of an
ample historical romance. There was necessary to offset this buoyant and
courageous Scotsman, adventurous and experienced, a character of the race
which captured him and held him in leash till just before the taking of
Quebec. I therefore found in the character of Doltaire--which was the
character of Voltaire spelled with a big D--purely a creature of the
imagination, one who, as the son of a peasant woman and Louis XV, should
be an effective offset to Major Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire
in the Memoirs. There could not be, nor of the plot on which the story
was based, because it was all imagination. Likewise, there was no
mention of Alixe Duvarney in the Memoirs, nor of Bigot or Madame Cournal
and all the others. They too, when not characters of the imagination,
were lifted out of the history of the time; but the first germ of the
story came from 'The Memoirs of Robert Stobo', and when 'The Seats of
the Mighty' was first published in 'The Atlantic Monthly' the subtitle
contained these words: "Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert Stobo,
sometime an officer in the Virginia Regiment, and afterwards of
Amherst's Regiment."

When the book was published, however, I changed the name of Robert Stobo
to Robert Moray, because I felt I had no right to saddle Robert Stobo's
name with all the incidents and experiences and strange enterprises
which the novel contained. I did not know then that perhaps it might be
considered an honour by Robert Stobo's descendants to have his name
retained. I could not foresee the extraordinary popularity of 'The
Seats of the Mighty', but with what I thought was a sense of honour I
eliminated his name and changed it to Robert Moray. 'The Seats of the