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