hang. But on considering my minor
characters, I saw there were five people who would--in a sense, who
must--break prison and attempt his rescue. They are capable hardy folks
too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not then? Why should
not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he
could, with his--but soft! I will not betray my secret nor my
heroine...."

To pass, now, from the question how the story would have ended to the
question how it originated and grew in the writer's mind. The character
of the hero, Weir of Hermiston, is avowedly suggested by the historical
personality of Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield. This famous judge has
been for generations the subject of a hundred Edinburgh tales and
anecdotes. Readers of Stevenson's essay on the Raeburn exhibition, in
"Virginibus Puerisque," will remember how he is fascinated by Raeburn's
portrait of Braxfield, even as Lockhart had been fascinated by a
different portrait of the same worthy sixty years before (see "Peter's
Letters to His Kinsfolk"); nor did his interest in the character
diminish in later life.

Again, the case of a judge involved by the exigencies of his office in a
strong conflict between public duty and private interest or affection,
was one which had always attracted and exercised Stevenson's
imagination. In the days when he and Mr. Henley were collaborating with
a view to the stage, Mr. Henley once proposed a plot founded on the
story of Mr. Justice Harbottle in Sheridan Le Fanu's "In a Glass
Darkly," in which the wicked judge goes headlong _per fas et nefas_ to
his object of getting the husband of his mistress hanged. Some time
later Stevenson and his wife together drafted a play called _The Hanging
Judge_. In this, the title character is tempted for the first time in
his life to tamper with the course of justice, in order to shield his
wife from persecution by a former husband who reappears after being
supposed dead. Bulwer's novel of "Paul Clifford," with its final
situation of the worldly-minded judge, Sir William Brandon, learning
that the highwayman whom he is in the act of sentencing is his own son,
and dying of the knowledge, was also well known to Stevenson, and
probably counted for something in the suggestion of the present story.

Once more, the difficulties often attending the relation of father and
son in actual life had pressed heavily on Stevenson's mind and
conscience from the days of his youth,