A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales

The se historical novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies, and abstractions of men.

Well, it seems to me that, parallel with this experience, is that which we gain, when, reading some first-rank romance, we encounter in its pages a figure with which History has made us more or less familiar.