merits, but also for
the historical value of the chapters which preserve the day by day
experience of one who took his share in the culminating dangers and
difficulties of an arduous campaign.

Mrs. Steel's book, _On the Face of the Waters_, has been so widely
read and reviewed since it appeared, so lately as 1897, that another
criticism of it may appear stale and superfluous; yet to omit
mentioning in this article the most popular of recent Indian novels
would be impossible. Here, at any rate, is a book which is not open to
the remark that the Anglo-Indian novelist usually leaves the natives
in the background, or admits them only as supernumeraries. For Mrs.
Steel's canvas is crowded with Indian figures; their talk, their
distinctive peculiarities of character and costume, their parts in the
great tragedy which is taken as the ground-plan of her story, are so
abundantly described as occasionally to bewilder the inexperienced
reader. The scene of action is the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut and the
siege of Delhi, and while the Indian _dramatis personae_ are mainly
types of different classes and castes--except where, like the King of
Delhi, they are historical--the English army leaders act and speak
under their own names, as in Durand's book, being of course modelled
upon the ample personal knowledge of them still obtainable from their
surviving contemporaries in India.

The book, in fact, attempts, as is frankly stated in its preface, 'to
be at once a story and a history.' And we observe that Mrs. Steel
tells us, as if it were a credit and a recommendation to her work,
that she 'has not allowed fiction to interfere with fact in the
slightest degree.'

'The reader may rest assured that every incident bearing in the
remotest degree on the Indian Mutiny, or on the part which real men
took in it, is scrupulously exact, even to the date, the hour, the
scene, the weather. Nor have I allowed the actual actors in the
great tragedy to say a word regarding it which is not to be found
in the accounts of eye-witnesses, or in their own writings.'

Is such minute matter-of-fact copying a virtue in the novelist? or is
it not rather a defect arising out of a misunderstanding of the
principles of his art? In our opinion the business of the novelist,
even when he chooses an historical subject, is not to reproduce as
many exact details as he can pick out of memoirs, official reports,
and histories, but, on the