thoughts and feelings of the characters. It was this development of
the personal novel at the commencement of the nineteenth century,
exhibited in Chateaubriand's _Rene_, Madame de Stael's _Corinne_,
Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, George Sand's _Indiana_, and
Sainte-Beuve's _Volupte_, which contributed so much to create and
establish the Romantic School of fiction with its egoistic lyricism.

The historical novel, which more commonly is looked upon as having
been the principal agent in the change, gave, in sooth, only what
modern fiction of every kind could no longer do without, namely, local
colour. The so-styled historical novels of Madame de la Fayette
--_Zayde_ and the _Princesse de Cleves_--in the seventeenth century, and
those of Madame de Tencin and Madame de Fontaines in the eighteenth,
were simply historic themes whereon the authors embroidered the
inventions of their imaginations, without the slightest attention to
accuracy or attempt at differentiating the men and minds of one age
from those of another; nor was it till the days of Walter Scott that
such care for local colour and truth of delineation was manifested by
writers who essayed to put life into the bones of the past.

Even Lesage, so exact in his description of all that is exterior,
lacked this literary truthfulness. His Spain is a land of fancy; his
Spaniards are not Spanish; _Gil Blas_, albeit he comes from
Santillana, is a Frenchman. Marivaux was wiser in placing his _Vie de
Marianne_ and his _Paysan parvenu_ in France. His people, though
modelled on stage pattern, are of his own times and country; and, in
so far as they reveal themselves, have resemblances to the characters
of Richardson.

To the Abbe Barthelemy, Voltaire, and Rousseau the novel was a