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.