Hewlett's style is finished and richly poetical, but often too ornate and too encrusted with archaic terms and other artificial forms.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, born in Cornwall in 1863, is a fiction writer, critic, poet, and anthologist. Having much of Stevenson's love for romantic adventure, he was chosen to finish St. Ives, left incomplete by Stevenson. The Splendid Spur (1889), a spirited tale of romance and war in the perturbed time of Charles I., is one of his best stories of adventure.
Among his books on simple Cornish life may be mentioned The Delectable Duchy (1893). It is a collection of short stories and sketches. Quiller-Couch sees life without a touch of morbid somberness and he commands a vivacious, highly-trained style.
William Frend De Morgan was born in London, in 1839. He published his first novel, Joseph Vance (1906), at the age of sixty-seven. This plain, straightforward story of a little boy befriended by a generous-hearted London doctor won for De Morgan wide and hearty applause. While some contemporary writers fashion their style and select their material on the models of French or Russian realists, De Morgan goes to the great English masters, Thackeray and Dickens. Like them, De Morgan writes copiously and leisurely.
Alice-for-Short (1907) and Somehow Good (1908) are strong novels, but Joseph Vance, with its carelessly constructed plot and power to awaken tears and smiles, remains De Morgan's best piece of fiction.
William John Locke was born in the Barbados in 1863. He gained much of his reputation from his tenth book, The Beloved Vagabond (1906). The book takes its charm from the whimsical and quixotic temperament of the hero. He is typical of Locke's other leading characters, who, like Hamlet's friend, Horatio, take "fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks." Like other novels by the same author, this story is pervaded by a distinctly Bohemian atmosphere, wherein the ordinary conventions of society are disregarded.
Locke's humor, his deft characterization, his toleration of human failings, largely compensate for his lack of significant plots. He is sometimes whimsical to the point of eccentricity, and his high spirits often verge on extravagance; but at his best he has the power of refreshing the reader with gentle irony, genial laughter, and love for human kind.
Israel Zangwill, the Jewish writer, was born in London in 1864. He first won fame by interpreting the Jewish temperament as he saw it manifested in London's dingy, pitiful Ghetto quarter. "This Ghetto London of ours," he says, "is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality, a world of dreams as fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven."
In his volume, The Children of the Ghetto (1892), Zangwill admirably chronicles the lives of these people and the sharp contrasts between their quaint traditions and a great modern commercial city's customs.