Finished reading: The Eagle’s Shadow 📚. Though this was Jame Branch Cabell’s first published novel, it comes comparatively late in the reading order of the Biography of Manuel, so I’m just getting to it (for the second or third time, I forget). It is a somewhat slight comic novel along traditional “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl” lines, complicated by a bit of comic business including multiple wills and a number of Lichfield personalities (who you will have met in other of his books, if you’ve been reading the whole set). I have the 1929 Storisende Edition (#1138 of 1590 numbered copies) which, in addition to being a physically lovely book, contains an appendix reprinting letters from the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. The bulk of these letters, from the novel’s first 1904 publication, deplore the awful vulgarity and profanity of the heroine (she says “Damn you!” in one pivotal scene) and mostly do not believe a well brought-up woman would even know that sort of language.