oo much use of the
attractive materials that are readily found to hand in military
records or in such a real tragedy as the Sepoy mutiny, so that the
novel is liable to become little more than authentic history related
in a glowing, exuberant style of writing and portraiture.

In short, the Indian novel belongs to the objective outdoor class; it
is full of open air and activity, and the introspective psychological
vein is almost entirely wanting. There are, indeed, passages which
indicate that peculiar sense of the correlation, so to speak, of the
environment with the moods and feelings of men, the influence upon the
human mind of nature--a sense which has inspired some of our finest
poetry, and which is so well rendered by the best Russian novelists,
by Tourgueneff and by Tolstoi. One work of Tolstoi's, _Les Cosaques_,
might be especially recommended for study to the Anglo-Indian novelist
of the future, as an example of the true impress that can be made upon
a reader's mind by the literary art, when it succeeds in giving vivid
interest to the picture of a solitary officer's life upon a dull and
distant frontier.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] (1) _Tara._ By Meadows Taylor. London, 1898. (2) _Oakfield._ By
William D. Arnold. London, 1853. (3) _The Wetherbys, Father and Son._
By John Lang. London, ?1850. (4) _Mr. Isaacs._ By F. Marion Crawford.
London, 1898. (5) _Helen Treveryan._ By John Roy. London, 1892. (6)
_On the Face of the Waters._ By Mrs. Steel. London, 1896. (7) _Bijli
the Dancer._ By James Blythe Patton. London, 1898. (8) _The Chronicles
of Dustypore._ By H. S. Cunningham. London, 1875. And other
Novels.--_Edinburgh Review_, October 1899.

[13] [Greek]
'alla chre ton katathaptein, hos ke thanesi,
nelea thumon echontas, ep hemati hoakrusants.'

(_Iliad_, xix. 228, 229.)

[14] _Naulakha_, by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier. London, 1892.

[15] _Transgression_, by S. S. Thorburn. London, 1899.

HEROIC POETRY[16]

I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of
strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse
those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind
are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought
into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering.
It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its
splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular
form; bec