yours for a season, unless you manage to carry them three times in
succession. Mr. Quiller-Couch has been champion Q since 1890.

The interesting question is not so much, What has he done to be the
only prominent Q of these years, as Is he to be the Q of all time?
If so, he will do better work than he has yet done, though several
of his latest sketches--and one in particular--are of very uncommon
merit. Mr. Quiller-Couch is so unlike Mr. Kipling that one
immediately wants to compare them. They are both young, and they
have both shown such promise that it will be almost sad if neither
can write a book to live--as, of course, neither has done as yet. Mr.
Kipling is the more audacious, which is probably a matter of
training. He was brought up in India, where one's beard grows much
quicker than at Oxford, and where you not only become a man (and a
cynic) in a hurry, but see and hear strange things (and print them)
such as the youth of Oxford miss, or, becoming acquainted with,
would not dare insert in the local magazine of the moment. So Mr.
Kipling's first work betokened a knowledge of the world that is by
no means to be found in "Dead Man's Rock," the first book published
by Mr. Quiller-Couch. On the other hand, it cannot truly be said
that Mr. Kipling's latest work is stronger than his first, while the
other writer's growth is the most remarkable thing about him. It is
precisely the same Mr. Kipling who is now in the magazines that was
writing some years ago in India (and a rare good Mr. Kipling too),
but the Mr. Quiller-Couch of to-day is the Quiller-Couch of "Dead
Man's Rock" grown out of recognition. To compare their styles is
really to compare the men. Mr. Kipling's is the more startling, the
stronger (as yet), and the more mannered. Mark Twain, it appears,
said he reads Mr. Kipling for his style, which is really the same
thing as saying you read him for his books, though the American