SOURCE: "Mr. Baring-Gould's Novels," in The Contemporary Review, Vol. LVII, January-June, 1890, pp. 206-14.

In the following essay, the author of Peter Pan assesses Baring-Gould as one of the finest contemporary novelists, while finding disparaging and unrealistic his depictions of the poor.

Sympathy is the ink in which all fiction should be written; indeed, we shall find, on examination, that the humour, which some say is the novelist's greatest gift, and the power of character-drawing by which others hold, are streams from this same source. There is often sympathy without humour, as so many writers with a purpose prove, but humour without sympathy is misnamed, and differs from real humour as Dickens's sportfulness from a sarcastic writer's sneers. Dickens is the greatest of the humorists, because, with a sense of the ridiculous, he had a heart that was a well of sympathy and reflected the poetry of the meanest...