Poor James Grant delighted many a schoolboy, and
perhaps his best work was never quite so much appreciated as it ought
to have been. "The Black Dragoons," "The Queen's Own," and "The
Romance of War" all contained good work, and many gallant lads
delighted their hearts with them; I know that one youth at least
learned "The Black Dragoons" by heart, and amused the people in a
lonely farm-house by reciting whole chapters on winter nights, and I
have some reason to believe that the book gave the boy a taste for
literature which ended in his becoming a novelist. But, as Grant went
on with machine-like regularity, how curiously similar to each other
his books became! Narvaez Cifuentes, in "The Romance of War," is the
type of all the villains; the young dragoons were all alike; the
wooden heroines might have been chopped out by a literary carpenter
from one model; the charges, the escapes, the perils of the hero never
varied very much from volume to volume; and the fact was obvious that
the brain had ceased to develop any strikingly original ideas and only
the busy hand worked on. A very sarcastic personage once observed that
"it is better for literary men to read a little occasionally.
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