walked along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any more than had the creator of Lavengro and Romany Rye. For the vast multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: "Every age must write its own books."  It is of no use for the pedantic critic to affirm, with pontifical fervour, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the "masters" and modernise it, is destined to win the favour of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol has entered into his kingdom.

In any case I read 

 with avidity, and recognised at once--as who would not have done?--that here was a striking addition to picaresque romances, that the author had not read 

, and the best stories by Defoe and Fielding for nothing, nor had he walked along the broad highways of England without observation and profit any more than had the creator of 

 and 

. For the vast multitude of readers of each epoch the dictum of Emerson stands: "Every age must write its own books."  It is of no use for the pedantic critic to affirm, with pontifical fervour, that Cervantes and Le Sage and Defoe are masters of literature and that our contemporaries are but pigmies in comparison. The great reading public of any age will not be bullied into reading the authors who have reached the dignity of classics. The writer who can catch some element of the spirit of the "masters" and modernise it, is destined to win the favour of the crowd. And thus Mr. Jeffery Farnol has entered into his kingdom.

Mr. Farnol was born in Birmingham some thirty-six years ago. His early years were spent at Lee, in Kent, where he and a younger brother Ewart, who fell in the Boer War, went to school. Our author recalls with gratitude that his mother never failed to believe in his possession of a literary gift, and had, in his boyhood, hopes of seeing him an author, and faith that he would be a successful one. But circumstances seemed to throw him into a quite different kind of activity, and everything pointed to the probability that his livelihood would be obtained in a world remote from literature. Schooldays were followed by an apprenticeship to engineering in London and in Birmingham. His experience included the work 

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