A Cabinet Secret

A reviewer in the Sydney Evening News was not impressed with the work: "He is not a great novelist, far from it. He has never given us characters which will endure in popular memory, whose sayings will pass into literature, and who will become ascharacter subjects for the painter...But A Cabinet Secret, interesting as it undoubtedly is to those who read for sensation alone, is very far from the level on which Mr. Boothby had established."^[4]

In the Examiner (Launceston, Tasmania) the reviewer was rather more enthusiastic: "Mr. Boothby is never at a loss for something original in the way of plot or something exciting in the matter of detail, and he has combined both in this work. It deals with a supposed danger to which Great Britain was exposed at the opening of the Boer war from the plots of a crew of conspirators who kidnap or assassinate the principal members of the Cabinet and the leading generals. The story is told in terse style, situations following each other in rapid succession, and to those who like that class of work the 'Cabinet Secret' will be full of interest."^[5]

• 1900 in Australian literature