R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

36 Hugh Walpole'Alas! poor soul,' sighed Kate, 'would I had died ere I broughtthee to that!' And with that they both began to cry at the samemoment.This is not, although it ought to be, fustian. I think itis saved by a certain almost noble sincerity which Readehas worked into the fabric of it. There is also in thepsychology of Griffith Gaunt much that is most interestingand moving and he is one of the best examples ofwhat the later Victorian melodramatists can do whenthey are stirred by some self-experienced human emotion.This is a wild, deeply coloured, securely formed book andthoroughly deserves revival.Henry Kingsley is, in my opinion, a yet more importantfigure than Reade. It is quite certain that he is mostundeservedly neglected. The space allotted to him in theDictionary of National Biography as compared with thatgiven to his brother Charles is scandalous; it is more andmore generally recognised to-day that he is in every waya novelist of greater importance than his brother.His life was romantic enough with its swift transitionsfrom Worcester College, Oxford, to the Australian goldfields,thence to England, then to the Franco-GermanWar where he was present at the battle of Sedan, thenback to England and novel-writing again. He was theauthor of at least six remarkable and memorable novels—Geoffrey Hamlyn, Ravenshoe, The Hillyars and the Burtons,Silcote of Silcotes, Mademoiselle Mathilde and Stretton.He is an especially good example of the novelists of thefading Victorian tradition who was almost untouched bythe theories and aims of the coming modern novel. Heis, in a way, the most old-fashioned novelist in Englishliterature. One might say that he would have been oldfashionedin whatever age he wrote, and that very fact,so long held against him, is now beginning to be hisprincipal charm. He is a remarkable example of what