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Thomas Holcroft embodied radical views in novels now quite forgotten. Robert Bage has left four works containing opinions of a revolutionary character "Barham Downs," "James Wallace," "The Fair Syrian," and "Mount Henneth." These novels are written in the form of a series of letters and have little narrative interest.
He is of the kind of Sir Charles Grandison, Rights-of-Mannified, which infests all these novels and is a great bore as, indeed, to me is the whole book. The earlier Man as He is is far better. Mount Henneth is perhaps the liveliest of all: though its liveliness is partly achieved by less merely extravagant unconventionalities than this.
He was a papermaker, and the son of a papermaker; he was never exactly affluent nor exactly needy; he was apparently a Quaker by education and a freethinker by choice; and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason or that to stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels: Mount Henneth, Barham Downs, The Fair Syrian, James Wallace, Man as he is, and Hermsprong.
One does not quite know why Scott, who included in the Ballantyne Novels three of Bage's, Mount Henneth , Barham Downs , and James Wallace , did not also include, if not The Fair Syrian , two others, Man as He is and the still later Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not . This last has sometimes been regarded as Bage's masterpiece: but it does not seem so to the present writer.
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