suitable for juvenile or untrained tastes, and authors whose appeal
is specially to those of maturer thought and experience.  Differing
as much in method and style as in choice of period and character
type, Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" and George Eliot's "Romola" have at
least this in common--they require a very high degree of
intelligence for their due appreciation.  Who, among those of us
with any knowledge of such works, would dream of recommending them
to a youthful reader fresh from the perusal of Miss Yonge's "Little
Duke," or Captain Marryatt's "Children of the New Forest"?

Naturally in a list of this kind there is bound to be very great
inequality; certain periods have been wholly ignored by writers of
the first rank, while in others we have something like an embarras
de richesse.  Consequently, I have been compelled, here and there,
to insert authors of only mediocre merit.  In other cases, again, I
have not hesitated to omit works by writers of acknowledged
position when these have seemed below the author's usual standard,
and where no gap had to be filled.  I would instance the James II.-
William III. period.  Here Stanley Weyman and "Edna Lyall" might
have been represented, but, there being no dearth of good novels
dealing with both the above reigns, I did not deem it advisable to
call in these popular writers at the point which has been very
generally considered their lowest.  I mention this to show that
omissions do not necessarily mean ignorance, though, in covering
such an immense ground, I cannot doubt that romances worthy of a
place in my list have been overlooked.

I think many will be surprised to find how large a proportion of
our best writers (English and American) have entered the domain of
Historical or Semi-Historical Romance.  Scott, Thackeray, Dickens,
George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, George Meredith, R. L. Stevenson,
Hawthorne, Peacock, Charles Kingsley, Henry Kingsley, Charles
Reade, Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Walter Besant, Lytton,
Disraeli, J. H. Newman, J. A. Froude, and Walter Pater--these are a
few of the names which appear in the following pages; while
Tolstoy, Dumas, Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, De Vigny, Prosper
Merimee, Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, Freytag, Scheffel, Hauff,
Auerbach, Manzoni, Perez Galdos, Merejkowski, Topelius,
Sienkiewicz, and Jokai are, perhaps, the chief amongst those
representing Literatures other than our own.

"The Last Days of Pompeii," "The Gladiators," "Hypatia," "Harold,"
"Ivanhoe," "The Talisman," "Maid Marian," "The Last of the Barons,"
"Quentin Durward," "Romola," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "The
Palace of the King," "Westward Ho!", "Kenilworth," "The Chaplet of
Pearls," "A Gentleman of France," "John Inglesant," "The Three
Musketeers," "Twenty Years After," "Woodstock," "Peveril of the
Peak," "Old Mortality," " The Betrothed Lovers" ("I Promessi
Sposi"), "Lorna Doone," "The Refugees," "In the Golden Days," "The
Courtship of Morice Buckler," "Dorothy Forster," "The Men of the
Moss Hags," "Esmond," "The Virginians," "Heart of Midlothian,"
"Waverley," "The Master of Ballantrae," "Kidnapped," "Catriona,"
"The Chaplain of the Fleet," "The Seats of the Mighty," "Barnaby
Rudge," "A Tale of Two Cities," "War and Peace"--what visions do
these mere titles arouse within many of us!  And, though most of
the books given in my list cannot be described in the same glowing
terms as the masterpieces just named, yet many "nests of pleasant
thoughts" may be formed through their companionship.

Hitherto allusion has been mainly in the direction of modern
authors, and I would now say a word or two in regard to those of an
earlier period who are also represented.  Defoe, Fielding,
Richardson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Frances Burney, Samuel Lover, John
Galt, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, William Godwin, Mary Shelley,
Fennimore Cooper, J. G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Thos. Moore, Harriet
Martineau, J. L. Motley, Horace Smith, Charles Lever, Meadows
Taylor, and Wm. Carleton,--these (in greater or less degree)
notable names were bound to have a place; and, coming to less
distinguished writers, I may mention the brothers Banim, Gerald
Griffin, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Lady Morgan, the sisters Porter, W. G.
Simms, George Croly, Albert Smith, G. R. Gleig, W. H. Maxwell, Sir
Arthur Helps, Eliot Warburton, Lewis Wingfield, Thomas Miller, C.
Macfarlane, Grace Aguilar, Anne Manning, and Emma Robinson (author
of "Whitefriars").  To G. P. R. James, Harrison Ainsworth, and
James Grant I have previously alluded.  It has been my endeavour to
choose the best examples of all the above-named novelists--a task
rendered specially difficult in some cases by the fact of immense
literary output.  Doubtless not a few of the works so chosen are
open to criticism, but they will at least serve to illustrate
certain stages in the growth of Historical Romance.  With the
exclusion of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Gore, Lady
Blessington, Lady Fullerton, Mrs. Bray, and Mrs. Child, few will, I
imagine, find fault; but writers like Miss Tucker (A. L. O. E.) and
Miss Emily Holt still find so many readers in juvenile quarters,
that it has required a certain amount of courage to place them also
on my Index Expurgatorius!  Turning once again to writers of the
sterner sex, I have ruled out C. R. Maturin, G. W. M. Reynolds, and
Pierce Egan, Junr.; and (quitting the "sensational" for the "mildly
entertaining") out of the Rev. J. M. Neale's many historical tales
I have selected only one--"Theodora Phranza," which, besides being
well written, has the merit of dealing with a somewhat neglected
period.  Stories possessing a background of History are to be found
in "Tales from Blackwood," as also in "Wilson's Tales of the
Borders," but their extremely slight character seemed scarcely to
justify insertion; while not even the high literary position
attained by him on other grounds reconciled me to either of Allan
Cunningham's novels--"Sir Michael Scott" and "Paul Jones."

Of the Foreign novelists appearing in my list, several have been
already named, but Marchese D'Azeglio, F. D. Guerrazzi, Cesare
Cantu, "W. Alexis" (G. Haring), H. Laube, Louise Mulbach (Klara M.
Mundt), Nicolas Josika, Viktor Rydberg, Hendrik Conscience, Xavier
B. Saintine, Amedee Achard, and "Erckmann-Chatrian" here call for
notice as not coming under strictly Contemporary classification.  I
would forestall the criticism that two writers have been passed
over whose fame is greater than any of those just mentioned, viz.:
"Stendhal" (Henri Beyle) and Alphonse Daudet.  Beyle's "La
Chartreuse de Parme," though containing the oft-praised account of
Waterloo, is far more Psychological than Historical; and Daudet's
"Robert Helmont," while it depicts (under Diary form) certain
aspects of the Franco-German War, has hardly any plot running
through it.  As the Waterloo and Franco-German War periods were
amply illustrated in numerous other novels of more assured
suitability, I had the less hesitation in deciding against the two
works just named.  In the selections from Foreign Historical
Fiction nothing more has been attempted than to include the leading
examples; most of these, it will be found, have been translated
into English.

Before leaving the subject of older writers, it may be mentioned
that not a few of the works chosen to represent them are, at the
moment, out of print.  To anyone objecting that something ought to
have been done to indicate this in each separate case, I would urge
that the "out of print" line can never be drawn with precision in
view of constant reprints as well as of further extinctions.

Perhaps this introduction may be most fitly concluded by something
in the nature of apology for Historical Romance itself.  Not only
has fault been found with the deficiencies of unskilled authors in
that department, but the question has been asked by one or two
critics of standing--What right has the Historical Novel to exist
at all?  More often than not, it is pointed out, the Romancist
gives us a mass of inaccuracies, which, while they mislead the
ignorant (i.e., the majority?), are an unpardonable offence to the
historically-minded reader.  Moreover, the writer of such Fiction,
though he be a Thackeray or a Scott, cannot surmount barriers which
are not merely hard to scale, but absolutely impassable.  The
spirit of a period is like the selfhood of a human being--something
that cannot be handed on; try as we may, it is impossible for us to
breathe the atmosphere of a bygone time, since all those thousand-
and-one details which went to the building up of both individual
and general experience, can never be reproduced.  We consider (say)
the Eighteenth Century from the purely Historical standpoint, and,
while we do so, are under no delusion as to our limitations; we
know that a few of the leading personages and events have been
brought before us in a more or less disjointed fashion, and are
perfectly aware that there is room for much discrepancy between the
pictures so presented to us (be it with immense skill) and the
actual facts as they took place in such and such a year.  But, goes
on the objector, in the case of a Historical Romance we allow
ourselves to be hoodwinked, for, under the influence of a pseudo-
historic security, we seem to watch the real sequence of events in
so far as these affect the characters in whom we are interested.
How we seem to live in those early years of the Eighteenth Century,
as we follow Henry Esmond from point to point, and yet, in truth,
we are breathing not the atmosphere of Addison and Steele, but the
atmosphere created by the brilliant Nineteenth Century Novelist,
partly out of his erudite conception of a former period, and partly
out of the emotions and thoughts engendered by that very
environment which was his own, and from which he could not escape!

Well, to all such criticisms it seems to me there are ample
rejoinders.  In the first place it must be remembered that History
itself possesses interest for us more as the unfolding of certain
moral and mental developments than as the mere enumeration of
facts.  Of course, I am aware that the ideal of the Historian is
Truth utterly regardless of prejudice and inclination, but, as with
all other human ideals, this one is never fully realised, and there
is ever that discrepancy between Fact and its Narration to which I
just now alluded.  This being so, I would ask--Is not the writer of
Fiction justified in emphasising those elements of History which
have a bearing on life and character in general?  There is,
doubtless, a wise and an unwise method of procedure.  One novelist,
in the very effort to be accurate, produces a work which--being
neither History nor Fiction--is simply dull; while another, who has
gauged the true relation between fact and imagination, knows better
than to bring into prominence that which should remain only as a
background.  After all, there are certain root motives and
principles which, though they vary indefinitely in their
application, underlie Human Conduct, and are common to all ages
alike.  Given a fairly accurate knowledge as regards the general
history of any period, combined with some investigation into its
special manners and customs, there is no reason why a truly
imaginative novelist should not produce a work at once satisfying
to romantic and historical instincts.

Again, if it be true that the novelist cannot reproduce the far
past in any strict sense, it is also true that neither can he so
reproduce the life and events of yesterday.  That power of
imaginative memory, which all exercise in daily experience, may be
held in very different degrees, but its enjoyment is not dependent
on accuracy of representation--for, were this so, none of us would
possess it.  In an analogous manner the writer of Romance may be
more or less adequately equipped on the side of History pure and
simple, but he need not wait for that which will never come--the
power of reproducing in toto a past age.  If, in reading what
purports to be no more than a Novel, the struggle between
Christianity and Paganism (for example), or the unbounded egotism
of Napoleon, be brought more vividly before our minds--and this may
be done by suggestion as well as by exact relation, then, I would