Coming across the name of Robert Louis Stevenson in a new publisher’s catalogue is rather like picking up the telephone to find oneself being chatted up by an old friend whom one has not thought about in years and was never all that close to in the first place. Though far from unhappy to hear the fellow’s voice, one could hardly be faulted for reacting with, above all, a feeling of profound wonderment—and even, perhaps, a trace of suspicion: what in heaven, after so many years of silence, could have motivated him to call?

Naturally, Stevenson himself, who last time we looked was still resting peacefully under the wide and starry Samoan sky, has nothing to do with placing this particular call. Indeed, one has the feeling that Stevenson—a skeptic in regard to the motives of publishers (“More and more,” he gripes in one essay, “the publisher comes to shroud his operations in shadow”)—would have been as curious as anyone, to put it temperately, about the story behind the appearance of The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays. Nor, I think, if he were aware of such matters, would he have hesitated to suggest that this assemblage—which first came out last year in Britain—might well owe its publication less to the keen interest of the Farrar, Straus editorial board in his work than in their regard for the position of Jeremy Treglown, the book’s editor, who is (as it happens) the editor as well of England’s most powerful critical