Winston Graham is a good, even an excellent historical novelist—though we are made continually aware that he is as adept at cunning maneuvers and his approximations remain approximations. In his new novel, "The Grove of Eagles," he does not wrestle with the angel; the fire of the past does not burn very brightly. He goes about the task of describing Elizabethan England with a scholar's load of proper mischief. He has soaked himself in local lore, knows his history, his towns, the shape of the vanished land; he has read the account books, and he can follow his people through the daily round, hour by hour and minute by minute.

Something is still missing. We are never completely convinced that it happened as he says it happened; the blaze of conviction is absent. One needs a kind of perversity in order to make the leap: one must get out of one's skin and become someone else altogether, as in her perverse fashion Dame Edith Sitwell became Elizabeth when she wrote about Elizabeth. She wrote of Elizabeth from the inside. Mr. Graham writes of the Queen, her court and her sometimes disloyal subjects from a safer distance.

This immensely long novel is set in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, and there is an impressive list of gaudy characters. Sir Walter Raleigh, arrogant and debonair, moody and tempestuous by turns, almost takes pride of place, and there are satisfying glimpses of the even more rebellious Essex. The hero, who tells his own story, is the young Cornishman, Maugan Killigrew; he is, in fact, no hero at all. He, too, has a flair for rebellion, suffers from paralyzing moments of self-doubt, and advances perilously only to retreat more perilously. In the end he is brought to trial before the Queen's Privy Council together with his father, who only just escapes the hangman's gibbet….

It is all excellent, beautifully and carefully studied. The characters talk too much and say too little—but that is a common fault in long novels. What one misses is the fire from heaven, the thunder, the trumpets, the light in the eyes, the spurt of blood. It is all a little too leisurely.

As a Cornishman, I applaud this picture of an Elizabethan Cornishman, but I wish devoutly that Quiller-Couch had not troubled the waters. "Q" left his imprint on literary Cornwall, and it may take another generation to wash it away. Mr. Graham has much of "Q"'s insight and elegance. One only wishes he had more of Dame Edith Sitwell's perversity.