B. Blackheath; to an old Caithness family, the Traills of Rattar; son of James Traill, the stipendiary magistrate of Greenwich and Woolwich Police Court; ed. Merchant Taylors' School; head of the school; scholarship at St. John's College, Oxford; destined for medicine; degree in natural sciences (grad. 1865); called to bar, 1869; app. Inspector of Returns for the Board of Education, 1871; contrib. Pall Mall Gazette (ed. Frederick Greenwood), 1873; moved with Greenwood to St. James's Gazette when the Pall Mall Gazette took the Liberal side, 1870; joined Saturday Review, contrib. weekly topical verses, rep. in Recaptured Rhymes, 1882 and Saturday Songs (1890); leader-writer for Daily Telegraph; ed. The Observer, 1889-91; increasing circulation; first ed. of Literature, 1897; issued anon. jeux d'esprit pamphlet as The Israelite Question and Comments on the Canaan Journals thereon (1876) which tell Exodus story in modern journalists’ styles; issued The New Lucian (1884; 2nd enl. edn., 1900); dir. Social England in 1893-1898; issued studies of Coleridge (1884), Sterne (1882), William III (1888), Shaftesbury (1886), Strafford (1889), and Lord Salisbury (1891); also a biography of Sir John Franklin (1896); a work on Egypt and a book on Lord Cromer (1897); issued essays as Number Twenty (1892, and The New Fiction (1897); also a play, Glaucus, a tale of a Fish (Olympic Theatre 1865), with Miss Nellie Farren in the title role; with Robert Hitchens, he wrote The Medicine Man, a sensational work about hypnotism [mersermism] with Henry Irving as Dr. Tregenna (Lyceum Th. 1898); also edited the Centenary edition of the Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (Chapman and Hall, 1896-1907), with introductions to various works.d. 21 Feb. 1900.