Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter. But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall _not_ be about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable destiny. It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to do more than touch upon a few books that may illustrate the prominent characteristics, and the general place in light literature, of Indian novels. This must explain why we have omitted several other works, of which _Transgression_[15] is the latest. In this tale we have a sketch of life on the North-West Frontier at the present day, with some well-known incidents of the Afridi War of 1897-98 introduced, and so coloured from the writer's own point of view as to convey, under a thin varnish of fiction, some sharp and sarcastic criticism on the management of affairs, the politics of the Government, and the personal behaviour of certain officials, who can be at once identified. Although the book is not without interest as a true account of hazardous and stirring frontier duties, we are bound to repeat our warning that this abuse of the novel for controversial purposes is not only unfair, but profoundly inartistic. No literary success, but failure and the confusion of styles, lies that way.