BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Crown 8vo.Cloth. 6s.
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS.
THE SATURDAY REVIEW.—"Mr. Kipling knows and appreciates the English in India, and is a born story-teller and a man of humour into the bargain. . . . It would be hard to find better reading."
DUBLIN EVENING MAIL.—"This is a delightful book. . . . Mr. Kipling is a man of genius, and prefers quality to quantity. Many of his stories are profoundly pathetic. We think the dominant note of his genius is pathos, but there is humour, rich and racy humour, in all of them."
GLASGOW HERALD.—"That the book will at least be as popular here as it has is in India we have no doubt. Possibly even a greater success is in store for it, seeing that for us it possesses rare qualities of freshness, of strange and brilliant colouring, of curious characterisation, and of unusual incident, which to the Anglo-Indian were probably familiar enough, though even in that case the genius of the must have lifted them out of the region of everyday life. One of the first things that strikes the reader is the exceptional excellence of the tales. In so large a collection as forty stories one naturally expects to find some two or three of peculiar power dwarfing the rest. It is the fate of most collections, but here there are at least a dozen, possibly even a score, with regard to which it would be quite impossible to say that this or that is the most powerful or the most beautiful. The explanation is simple—the variety equals the intensity, the imaginative insight, the literary tact. Indeed, we are not sure whether this variety—inexhaustible it seems—is not by far and away the most striking and the most satisfactory characteristic of the volume. The man who wrote these tales has manifestly numberless others to tell. . . . Character, situation, incident, humour, pathos, tragic force, are all in abundance; words alone are at a minimum. Of course these are "plain" tales, lightning-flash tales. A gleam, and there the whole tragedy or comedy is before you—elaborate it for yourself afterwards."
SCOTTISH REVIEW.—. . . Whatever may be Mr. Kipling's ability in the higher walks of fiction, his ability as a story-teller or for narrating such incidents, whether real or fictitious, as are here put together is beyond question. They are told with ease, force, and directness. The humorous stories are probably the best, but whether humorous or grave—and there are both in the volume—they throw considerable light upon certain phases of European society in India and on numerous aspects of native Indian life. There is not an uninteresting story in the volume, and one closes the book with the desire to read the other stories Mr. Kipling so often alludes to, and somewhat tantalisingly passes over.
BROAD ARROW.—Mr. Kipling is accomplished beyond all recent standards of comparison, and his forty stories are all readable and clever. They are about India, its social and military life, its borderlands of race, its adventurous new arrivals, its old stages, its frauds, and its follies. There is a freshness about them rare in such delicious morsels of satire and sentiment. . . . The stories, in fact, are clever throughout, and there is not a dull page in the three hundred and ten. Life in and about Simla is portrayed with an adroitness always interesting, and certain to be especially so to the Anglo-Indian, the military reader, and the lover of quaint, fresh, out-of-the-way tales of love, jealousy, intrigue, and adventure."
MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON.
