Hope was a barrister who gave up the law after the success of his novel The Prisoner of Zenda. This book begins: In the year 1884 the Republic of Aureataland was certainly not in a flourishing condition. Although most happily situated (it lies on the coast of South America, rather to the north-I mustn't be more definite), and gifted with an extensive territory, nearly as big as Yorkshire, it had yet failed to make that material progress which had been hoped by its founders. It is true that the state was still in its infancy, being an offshoot from another and larger realm, and having obtained the boon of freedom and self-government only as recently has 1871, after a series of political convulsions of a violent character, which may be studied with advantage in the well-known history of The Making of Aureataland, by a learned professor of the Jeremiah P. Jecks University in the United States of America.