SOURCE: "The Romantics," in Old Gods Falling, Collins Publishers, 1939, pp. 279-89.

In the following excerpt, Elwin presents a critical overview of Hope's body of work.

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, who wrote under the name of Anthony Hope, provides another instance of a novelist whose success denied him fair consideration by the critics. The son of a London clergyman, he won a scholarship at Marlborough and an exhibition at Balliol, took a double first at Oxford and was President of the Union at a time when Archbishop Lang, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, Gilbert Murray, Sir Michael Sadler, and Quiller-Couch were contemporaries, and having been called to the bar in 1887, for a time devilled for Asquith. Like Haggard, he beguiled his leisure in waiting for briefs by writing, and in 1890 published at his own expense hisfirst novel, A Man of Mark. The story is a political skit somewhat after the...