'Translation' sets out his guiding principles on the subject. Original writing Novels Of Lucas's novels the best received was Cécile (1930), a tale of love, society and politics in the France of 1775–1776. Lucas dedicated the book to T. E. Lawrence, a friend and admirer. He wrote two further historical novels, Doctor Dido (1938), set in Cambridge in 1792–1812, and The English Agent: A Tale of the Peninsular War (1969), set in Spain in 1808; and a novella, The Woman Clothed with the Sun (1937), on the Buchanites of the 1780s–90s. The three novels focus on a love-affair between an Englishman and a Frenchwoman (Lucas was a self-confessed gallomane); the Scots novella takes the form of an account, written by a Scottish minister in middle age, of his youthful bewitchment by Elspeth Buchan and of his curious sojourn among the Buchanites. A theme common to all four is the tension between fragile 18th-century rationalism and, in varying forms, Romantic "enthusiasm" and unreason. For his semi-autobiographical first novel, The River Flows (1926), see Personal Life above. Poems As a poet Lucas was a polished ironist. Early collections (Time and Memory, 1929, Marionettes, 1930, Poems, 1935) were mostly personal lyrics or satires, but he came to specialise in dramatic monologues and narrative poems based on historical episodes "that seem lastingly alive" (Messene Redeemed, 1940; From Many Times and Lands, 1953). His First World War poems, including Morituri – August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt' (1935) and (below) ' "The Night is Chilly but not Dark" ' (1935), offer a retrospect of his experiences at the front. On nights when the moon creeps shrouded up the sky And hedge and holt lie glimmering ghostly grey, A voice still whispers in me, far away – A good night, this, for wiring – and suddenly There rises from the dead that shadowy hell, The barbed-wire rasps, uncoiling through my hand, The flares dance flickering over no-man's-land, A dull machine-gun raps from La Boisselle. Then fades the phantom, and once more I know Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now, Our battlefields reconquered by the plough, And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago. The inclusion of 'Beleaguered Cities' (1929) in various mid-twentieth century anthologies of English verse made it probably Lucas's best-known poem. Others that have gained currency through anthologies include 'The Destined Hour' (1953), a re-telling in verse of the old