attractive or repellent personalities.
Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his
later work. He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric
power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and picturesque
English.

Eden Phillpotts was born in India in 1862. His novels, however, are
as definitely associated with Devonshire as Hardy's are with Wessex,
and Bennett's with North Staffordshire. Phillpotts is noted for his
power to paint "landscapes with figures." The "figures" are the
farmers, villagers, and shepherds of that part of Devon, known as
Dartmoor; and the landscapes are the granite crags, the moors; and
farmlands of "good red earth." _Widecombe Fair_ (1913) is the
twentieth volume that he has published as a result of twenty years'
work among these children of Devon. Sometimes the roughness and
untutored emotions of the Dartmoor characters repel the readers; but
these characters form strong, picturesque groups of human beings, and
their dialect adds a pleasant flavor to the novels. Phillpotts's
frequent use of coincidences weakens the effect and mars the
naturalness of the plot, since their recurrence comes to be
anticipated. _Children of the Mist_ (1898) and _Demeter's Daughter_
(1911) are among his ablest novels.

Maurice Hewlett was born in Kent in 1861, of an old Somerset family.
He began writing in his boyhood, giving proof even then of his skill
in catching the manner of other writers. His style to-day reechoes his
reading of many authors in Latin, French, Italian, and English.

_The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay_ (1900) shows Hewlett's
romantic fancy and love for historical characters and pageants. While
this novel is full of life, color, and movement, it displays his
proneness to allow the romantic vein to run to the fantastic in both
episode and style. _The Stooping Lady_ (1907) deals with the love of a
lady of high degree for a humble youth whom her devotion ennobles.

Hewlett's style is finished and richly poetical, but often too ornate
and too encrusted with archaic terms and other artificial forms.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, born in Cornwall in 1863, is a fiction
writer, critic, poet, and anthologist. Having much of Stevenson's love
for romantic adventure, he was chosen to finish _St. Ives_, left
incomplete by Stevenson. _The Splendid Spur_ (1889), a spirited tale
of romance and war in the perturbed time of Charles I., is one of his
best stories of