He has worked in many fields, and in all with so much acceptance that a list of his books would be the best exposition of the range of his untiring pen.  To a gift of ready words and ready illustration, whether he concerns himself with diversities of early Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character.  He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable.  But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these a long list of novels.

His secret of popularity lies not in his treatment, which is neither critical nor scientific, but rather in a clever, easy, diffuse, jovial, amusing way of saying clearly what at the moment comes to him to say.  His books have a certain raciness and spirit that recall the English squire of tradition.  They rarely smell of the lamp.  Now and then appears a strain of sturdy scholarship, leading the reader to wonder what his author might have accomplished had he not enjoyed the comfortable ease of a country justice of the peace, and a rector with large landed estates, to whom his poorer neighbors appear a sort of dancing puppets.

Between 1857 and 1870, Baring-Gould had published nine volumes, the best known of these being ‘Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.’  From 1870 to 1890 his name appeared as author on the title-page of forty-three books:  sermons, lectures, essays, archaeological treatises, memoirs, curiosities of literature, histories, and fiction; sixteen novels, tales, and romances being included.  From 1890 to 1896 he published seventeen more novels, and many of his books have passed through several editions.  His most successful novels are ’Mehalah; a Tale of the Salt Marshes,’ ‘In the Roar of the Sea,’ ‘Red Spider,’ ‘Richard Cable,’ and ‘Noemi; a Story of Rock-Dwellers.’

In an essay upon his fiction, Mr. J.M.  Barrie writes in The Contemporary Review (February, 1890):—­

“Of our eight or ten living novelists who are popular by merit, few have greater ability than Mr. Baring-Gould.  His characters are bold and forcible figures, his wit is as ready as his figures of speech are apt.  He has a powerful imagination, and is quaintly fanciful.  When he describes a storm, we can see his trees breaking in the gale.  So enormous and accurate is his general information that there is no trade or profession with which he does not seem familiar.  So far as scientific knowledge is concerned, he is obviously better equipped than any contemporary writer of fiction.  Yet one rises from his books with a feeling of repulsion, or at least with the glad conviction that his ignoble views of life are as untrue as the characters who illustrate them.  Here is a melancholy case of a novelist, not only clever but sincere, undone by want of