more pleasure in "A Tale of Two Cities" than was to be extracted from
any merit or interest in that unreal novel.

This much however, may be said of history, that it is looking up in
these days as a result of studying the spirit of the novel. It was
not many years ago that the ponderous gentlemen who write criticisms
(chiefly because it has been forgotten how to stop that ancient waste
of paper and ink) could find nothing more biting to say of Macaulay's
"England" than that it was "a splendid work of imagination," of Froude's
"Caesar" that it was "magnificent political fiction," and of Taine's
"France" that "it was so fine it should have been history instead of
fiction." And ever since then the world has read only these three
writers upon these three epochs--and many other men have been writing
history upon the same model. No good novel-reader need be ashamed to
read them, in fact. They are so like the real thing we find in the
greatest novels, instead of being the usual pompous official lies of
old-time history, that there are flesh, blood and warmth in them.

In 1877, after the railway riots, legislative halls heard the French
Revolution rehearsed from all points of view. In one capital, where I
was reporting the debate, Old Oracle, with every fact at hand from "In
the beginning" to the exact popular vote in 1876, talked two hours of
accurate historical data from all the French histories, after which a
young lawyer replied in fifteen minutes with a vivid picture of the
popular conditions, the revolt and the result. Will it be allowable, in
the interest of conveying exact impression, to say that Old Oracle was
"swiped" off the earth? No other word will relieve my conscience.
After it was all over I asked the young lawyer where he got his French
history.