The character of the hero, Weir of Hermiston, is avowedly suggested by the historical personality of Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield.

This famous judge has been for generations the subject of a hundred Edinburgh tales and anecdotes.

Readers of Stevenson's essay on the Raeburn exhibition, in _Virginibus Puerisque_, will remember how he is fascinated by Raeburn's portrait of Braxfield, even as Lockhart had been fascinated by a different portrait of the same worthy sixty years before (see _Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk_); nor did his interest in the character diminish in later life.

Again, the case of a judge involved by the exigencies of his office in a strong conflict between public duty and private interest or affection, was one which had always attracted and exercised Stevenson's imagination.

In the days when he and Mr.Henley were collaborating with a view to the stage, Mr.Henley once proposed a plot founded on the story of Mr.Justice Harbottle in Sheridan Le Fanu's _In a Glass Darkly_, in which the wicked judge goes headlong _per fas et nefas_ to his object of getting the husband of his mistress hanged.