published in the spring of
1896 by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., of New York, and Messrs. Methuen &
Co., of London, I ran across a tiny little volume in the library of Mr.
George M. Fairchild, Jr., of Quebec, called the Memoirs of Major
Robert Stobo. It was published by John S. Davidson, of Market Street,
Pittsburgh, with an introduction by an editor who signed himself "N.
B.C."

The Memoirs proper contained about seventeen thousand words, the
remaining three thousand words being made up of abstracts and appendices
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 c