A Change Of Air

In his speech at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy in 1894, among many other good things, Mr. Andrew Lang said: "The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich, produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary 'tracts for the times.' Fortunately we have among us many novelists-young ones, luckily-who are true to the primitive and eternal, the Fijian canons of fiction. We have Oriental romance from the author of 'Plain Tales from the Hills.' We have the humor and tenderness-certainly not Fijian, I admit-which produces that masterpiece 'A Window in Thrums'; we have the adventurous fancy that gives us 'A Gentleman of France, ' 'The Master of Ballantrae, ' 'Micah Clarke, ' 'The Raiders, ' 'The Prisoner of Zenda.'" The last of these books was by Anthony Hope Hawkins, whom Mr. Lang thus classed among potential immortals. This romance has made him within the last three months fairly famous. Walter Besant, too, has stamped it with his high approval, and the English and American press have been unusually unanimous in their praise.