Mr. Henry James, speaking of the quarrel between Alan Breck and David Balfour in Kidnapped, declares that he knows of " few better examples of the way genius has ever a surprise in its pocket — keeps an ace, as it were, up its sleeve." And in Weir of Hermiston we have a surprise of an even higher order from Stevenson's pocket; that pocket which during his lifetime seemed like the proverbial small boy's—almost inexhaustible, stuffed full of a delightfully heterogeneous mass, sometimes of jingling trinkets, and sometimes of the oddest and rarest treasures. It may seem rash to declare a half-finished and half-revised book the greatest achievement of an author who had so high a passion for finality as Stevenson, but many will unhesitatingly declare Weir of Hermiston Stevenson's best book.
