w days before his death to Mr. Gosse. The allusions are to the
various views and attitudes of people in regard to middle age, and are
suggested by Mr. Gosse's volume of poems, "In Russet and Silver." "It
seems rather funny," he writes, "that this matter should come up just
now, as I am at present engaged in treating a severe case of middle age
in one of my stories, 'The Justice-Clerk.' The case is that of a woman,
and I think I am doing her justice. You will be interested, I believe,
to see the difference in our treatments. 'Secreta Vitae' [the title of
one of Mr. Gosse's poems] comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie."
From the quality of the midnight scene between her and Archie, we may
judge what we have lost in those later scenes where she was to have
taxed him with the fault that was not his--to have presently learned his
innocence from the lips of his supposed victim--to have then vindicated
him to her kinsmen and fired them to the action of his rescue. The scene
of the prison-breaking here planned by Stevenson would have gained
interest (as will already have occurred to readers) from comparison with
the two famous precedents in Scott, the Porteous mob and the breaking of
Portanferry gaol.

The best account of Stevenson's methods of imaginative work is in the
following sentences from a letter of his own to Mr. W. Craibe Angus of
Glasgow:--"I am still 'a slow study,' and sit for a long while silent on
my eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your
subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there
your stuff is--good or bad." The several elements above noted having
been left to work for many years in his mind, it was in the autumn of
1892 that he was moved to "take the lid off and look in,"--under the
influence, it would seem, of a special and overmastering wave of that
feeling for the romance of Scottish scenery and character which was at
all times so strong in him, and which his exile did so much to
intensify. I quote again from his letter to Mr. Barrie on November 1st
in that year:--"It is a singular thing that I should live here in the
South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my
imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills
from which we come. I have finished 'David Balfour,' I have another book
on the stocks, 'The Young Chevalier,' which is to be part in France and
part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince Charlie about th