l one fine morning she beats them down and comes into her
kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that is to live through her.
It is a great novel, that book of the master's, so perfect as a
novel that one does not realize what a masterly study it is of the
life and ends and aims of the people who make plays live.

_Nebraska State Journal_, March 29, 1896

_Harold Frederic_

"THE MARKET-PLACE." Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York: F. A.
Stokes & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.

Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work of that great
man whose career ended so prematurely and so tragically. The story
is a study in the ethics and purposes of money-getting, in the
romantic element in modern business. In it finance is presented not
as being merely the province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty
personal gratification, but of great projects, of great
brain-battles, a field for the exercising of talent, daring,
imagination, appealing to the strength of a strong man, filling the
same place in men's lives that was once filled by the incentives of
war, kindling in man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero
of the story, "Joel Thorpe," is one of those men, huge of body, keen
of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men, and a
magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked and lost in
a dozen countries, been almost within reach of fortune a dozen
times, and always missed her until, finally, in London, by promoting
a great rubber syndicate he becomes a multi-millionaire. He marries
the most beautiful and one of the most impecunious peeresses in
England and retires to his country estate. There, as a gentleman of
leisure, he loses his motive in life, loses power for lack of
opportunity, and grows less commanding even in the eyes of his wife,
who misses the uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by
storm and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic
scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.

Mr. Frederic says:

"Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the
greatest men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred
other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St.
Helena in excellent health, with companions that he talked
freely to, and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of
his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence
worth repeating. The greatn