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R. HALL CAINE, one of the most original and powerful of our later novelists, is only now in his thirty-eighth year, and may be therefore said to have attained celebrity at an early period of life. He was born August 14, 1853, at Runcorn, in Lancashire, and is doubtless indebted to his Manx parentage and to the reminiscences of his childhood for much of his peculiar power as an author. Originally intended for an architect, he studied for that profession in Liverpool, but at the age of twenty he commenced a career as a journalist, the stepping-stone of so many other famous novelists. In 1880 he came to London, and spent a precious year with D. G. Rossetti, by whose bedside he sat when that gifted poet drew his last breath. During that period Mr. Caine contributed to the The Athenæum and The Academy. His "Sonnets of Three Centuries" were published in 1881, and were followed by "Recollections of Rossetti" (1882), "Cobwebs of Criticism" (1883), and "Life of Coleridge" (1886). Before the publication of this latter work he wrote his first novel, "The Shadow of a Crime," which immediately attracted attention to him as a novelist of rare originality. "The Deemster" (1887), and "The Bondman" (1890), confirmed the hopes entertained of him, and set the seal upon his fame.