No, I have not the Edinburgh edition.  If you think of a presentation—­but I should be the last to suggest it.  Perhaps on the whole I would prefer to have him in scattered books, rather than in a complete set.  The half is more than the whole of most authors, and not the least of him.  I am sure that his friends who reverenced his memory had good warrant and express instructions to publish this complete edition—­very possibly it was arranged before his lamented end.  Yet, speaking generally, I would say that an author was best served by being very carefully pruned before being exposed to the winds of time.  Let every weak twig, every immature shoot be shorn away, and nothing but strong, sturdy, well-seasoned branches left.  So shall the whole tree stand strong for years to come.  How false an impression of the true Stevenson would our critical grandchild acquire if he chanced to pick down any one of half a dozen of these volumes!  As we watched his hand stray down the rank, how we would pray that it might alight upon the ones we love, on the “New Arabian Nights” “The Ebb-tide,” “The Wrecker,” “Kidnapped,” or “Treasure Island.”  These can surely never lose their charm.

What noble books of their class are those last, “Kidnapped” and “Treasure Island”! both, as you see, shining forth upon my lower shelf.  “Treasure Island” is the better story, while I could imagine that “Kidnapped” might have the more permanent value as being an excellent and graphic sketch of the state of the Highlands after the last Jacobite insurrection.  Each contains one novel and admirable character, Alan Breck in the one, and Long John in the other.  Surely John Silver, with his face the size of a ham, and his little gleaming eyes like crumbs of glass in the centre of it, is the king of all seafaring desperadoes.  Observe how the strong effect is produced in his case:  seldom by direct assertion on the part of the story-teller, but usually by comparison, innuendo, or indirect reference.  The objectionable Billy Bones is haunted by the dread of “a seafaring man with one leg.”  Captain Flint, we are told, was a brave man; “he was afraid of none, not he, only Silver—­Silver was that genteel.”  Or, again, where John himself says, “there was some that was feared of Pew, and some that was feared of Flint; but Flint his own self was feared of me.  Feared he was, and proud.  They was the roughest crew afloat was Flint’s.  The devil himself would have been feared to go to sea with them.  Well, now, I will tell you.  I’m not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy I keep company; but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasn’t the word for Flint’s old buccaneers.”  So, by a touch here and a hint there, there grows upon us the individuality of the smooth-tongued, ruthless, masterful, one-legged devil.  He is to us not a creation of fiction, but an organic living reality with whom we have come in contact; such is the effect of the fine suggestive strokes with which he is drawn.