The Captain of the Wight, by Frank Cowper (Seeley and
Co.), takes us back exactly four hundred, years, to the time when Sir Edward Woodville was " Lord and Captain of the Isle of Wight', under Henry VII., and was able to induce four hundred of its inhabitants to follow him in an essentially mad expedition to Brittany, in which he and his men, though they fought with the utmost gallantry, succumbed to overwhelming odds. Mr. Frank Cowper, whose local knowledge stands him in good stead in this volume, as it did in " Ciedwalla," has studied the facts and draperies of the period of which he treats with great care. He makes the most of Carisbrooke Castle, of course; and his narrative of the ill-starred expedition into Brittany is very spirited. He also provides his boy-readers with a hero in the shape of a gallant young squire, Ralph Leslie, whose irrepressibly light-hearted friend, Dicky Chepe, makes an admirable foil to him. Altogether, what with love—but not too much of that—and treachery, and jilting, and illustrations which, though vivid, are not too vivid, perhaps because they are not coloured, Mr. Cowper has produced a very attractive story, and one which deserves, and will doubtless secure, many readers.
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