eir plot, which is generally built carelessly and
disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception.
The main situation in _The Wrecker_ is a splendid product of romantic
aspiration, but the structure of the 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
on the Bass Rock in _Catriona_, the supernatural terrors that hover and
mutter over the island of _The Merry Men_--these imaginations are plainly
generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in some
sort the genius of the place it inhabits.

In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured freely
enough into the realm of the supernatural.

When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows
his humorous enjoymen