chase scenes, dramatic battles and high-strung melodrama. The gist of Levett-Yeats' Chevalier d'Auriac, said The New York Times, "is the way the King reveals his true manliness and gives over Mme. de Tremouille to the Chevalier, who had wooed her so long and undergone so many dangers on her account." Perhaps more darkly, The Times hinted in its review of such astonishing similarities between Levett's book and that of another popular writer of the day, Stanley J. Weyman, that, it declared, "were it not for the author's name and preface, the average reader would certainly believe (it) to be another work from the facile pen of Mr. Weyman." For English novelists of the age, India offered a beguiling chance to explore the exotic and the raffish. Levett-Yeats began with tales of the East, before moving on mostly to stories set among the jousters of medieval Europe. "India still remains a favorite hunting-ground of the novelist, and the field of Mr. Kipling and Mrs. Steel is this week re-occupied by Mr. S. Levett-Yeats, who is well-known at the libraries by reason of his successful story, 'The Honour of Savelli,'" said the New York magazine The Critic in 1897. Because of his service as soldier, bureaucrat and traveller on the Indian subcontinent, noted the magazine, "he has therefore had abundant opportunity for observing the things which he describes." Later life Unlike Kipling, who stayed with the characters and literary topography he mined in India, Levett-Yeats was driven by temperament or the demands of readers and the marketplace to stray further afield. He returned to England, where he lived as a successful, although mostly critically ignored, commercial novelist. Unlike Kipling, Levett-Yeats seemed more interested in rewards of the pocketbook rather than paeans from the critics, and by that measure, at least, he seems to have been a success. In his retelling of medieval legends that echoed King Arthur, Levett-Yeats provided a window into the British colonial mind at the end of the nineteenth century. Some scholars now suggest that Levett-Yeats' tales of chivalric derring-do mask a deeper insecurity about the English mandate in India. Underlying the romance of Levett-Yeats' tales, they suggest, is a darker world view, tinctured by the challenges to British authority in the Punjab after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which demonstrated how tenuous the East India Company's hold was on an enormous nation. Levett-Yeats anachronistic tales of distressed damsels