NOVELISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BEING PASSAGES FROM THEIR WORKS BY MACKENZIE BELI. Author of Charles Whitehead, IN THREE VOLUMES VOLUME II LINCOLN MAC VEAGH FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD Born at the Bagna Di Lucca, Italy, August 2, 1854. Died at Sorrento, Italy, April 9, 1909 MARION CRAWFORD was an American citizen. When three years had been spent at St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, he came to England, at the age of fifteen, and studied, first with a private tutor in Essex, and subsequently at Trinity College, Cambridge. Later, he studied at Karlsruhe, in Germany, at Rome, and at Harvard University. While in India for nearly two years (where he was chiefly occupied with journalism and the study of Oriental languages), he was gathering unconsciously materials for Mr. Isaacs and Zoroaster, though, at the time, he had no thoughts of devoting himself to fiction. Indeed he was first led to write Mr. Isaacs by finding, quite accidentally, that an anecdote which he had told at a dinner-party about a Mr. Jacobs, a diamond merchant of Simla, had deeply impressed his hearers. During his closing years Crawford lived almost entirely in Italy, and a good deal at Sorrento, the beautiful scenery around which place he has well described in To Leeward. Crawford was the author of the National Ode, sung in Philadelphia, at the Centenary of the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Isaacs is a story of Indian life told by Mr. Griggs, an American newspaper man. The principle characters are a refined and intellectual Persian gentleman called Mr. Isaacsthe Anglicised form of his name-and Miss Westonhaugh, an English girl. The other dramatis personæ are, so to speak, grouped around these. A DINNER PARTY IN INDIA I watched Miss Westonhaugh while Isaacs was speaking. She had evidently heard the whole story, for her expression showed beforehand the emotion she expected to feel at each point. Her colour came and went softly, and her eyes brightened with a VOL. II, 1 B |