The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man’s letters, when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says that her late husband’s friends—if such she still holds them to be—have hastened to make money out of the scraps and scrawls he sent them. The charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment’s reflection supplies its modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead friend’s letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends—friends such as those he made in Bournemouth, Lady Shelley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the most attached a man ever had—not one has brought out of his or her treasury the delightful letters of “R. L. S.” We have the Vailima Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse sent to the Times. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not “sold”? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of a dedication of Mr. Gosse’s poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his craft so well, and could hardly elude it in his least-considered letters, introduced his own figure as a sort of foil—he was childless. That word, uttered with regret, has, perhaps, a pang which the heart of a widow might imagine she should be spared. Again, in one of the Vailima Letters, Stevenson refers to his having been happy only once in his life, and that, too, on the chance of its misinterpretation, may be ashes in Mrs. Stevenson’s mouth. Yet who does not know “R. L. S.” as a man of moods? He is that, and nothing else, in some of his letters. And no chance phrase of his will ever be read to the discredit of Mrs. Stevenson—she may take the English reader’s oath on that.

In one of his Vailima Letters Stevenson speaks of the “incredible” pains he has given to the first chapter of “Weir of Hermiston.” Yet, after that even he remodelled it. It was worth the trouble, and the other seven and a bit are worthy of it. The very title was a serious trouble to him. “Braxfield” he would have liked it to be, but the judge of that name was not treated with enough historical care to warrant the adoption of it. Another name, “The Hanging Judge,” he abandoned; also “The Lord Justice Clerk,” also “The Two Kirsties of Cauldstaneship,” and “The Four Black Brothers.” No doubt in choosing “Weir of Hermiston”—with some of the sound-romance of Dobell’s “Keiths of Revelston” about it—he chose finally for the best.—The Sketch.

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