To this day there are lively controversies whether he worked up the Doone story from local tradition or made it "out of his own head." But whichever he did (and the present historian owns that he cares very little about the point) the way in which he has turned a striking, but not extraordinary, and certainly not very extensive West Country glen into an _Arabian Nights_ valley, with the figures and action of a mediaeval romance and the human interest of a modern novel, is really wonderful.

And there is hardly a book of his last thirty years' production, from _Clara Vaughan_ to _Perlycross_, which has not vigour, variety, character, "race" enough for half a dozen.

In such books, for example, as _The Maid of Sker_ and _Cripps the Carrier_ the idiosyncrasy is extraordinary: the quaint and piquant oddity of phrase and apophthegm is as vivid as Dickens, rather more real, and tinged somehow with a flavour of literature, even of poetry, which was Dickens's constant lack.
And yet when one comes to consider the books critically, either one by one, or in pairs and batches, or as a whole, it is somehow or other difficult to pronounce any one exactly a masterpiece.

There is a want of "inevitableness" which sometimes amounts to improbability, as in the case particularly of that most vivid and racy of books, _Cripps the Carrier_, where the central incident or situation, though by no means impossible, is almost insultingly unlikely, and forces its unlikeliness on one at almost every moment and turn.

Never, perhaps, was there a better instance of that "possible-improbable" which contrasts so fatally with the "probable-impossible." In not a few cases, too, there is that reproduction of similar _denouements_ and crucial occurrences which is almost necessary in a time when men write many novels.