Coleridge

Henry Duff Traill (1842-1900) was a British author and journalist. His playful humour and his ready wit were only given full scope when he was writing to please himself. One of his most brilliant jeux d esprit was a pamphlet which was published without his name soon after he had begun to write for the newspapers. It was called The Israelitish Question and the Comments of the Canaan Journals Thereon (1876). This told the story of the Exodus in articles which parodied very cleverly the style of all the leading journals of the day, and was at once recognized as the work of a born humourist. He sustained this reputation with The New Lucian (1884), but for the rest his labours were upon more serious lines. He directed the production of a vast work on Social England in 1893-1898; he wrote, for several series of biographies, studies of various great men; he compiled a biography of Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer (1896); and after a visit to Egypt he published a volume on the country. In conjunction with Robert Hichens he wrote The Medicine Man, produced at the Lyceum in 1898.