"From Dumas," he answered, "and from critical reviews of his novels.
He's short on dates and documents, but he's long on the general facts."

Why not? Are not novels history?

Book for book, is not a novel by a competent conscientious novelist
just as truthful a record of typical men, manners and motives as formal
history is of official men, events and motives?

There are persons created out of the dreams of genius so real, so
actual, so burnt into the heart and mind of the world that they have
become historical. Do they not show you, in the old Ursuline Convent at
New Orleans, the cell where poor Manon Lescaut sat alone in tears? And
do they not show you her very grave on the banks of the lake? Have I not
stood by the simple grave at Richmond, Virginia, where never lay the
body of Pocahontas and listened to the story of her burial there? One
of the loveliest women I ever knew admits that every time she visits
relatives at Salem she goes out to look at the mound over the broken
heart of Hester Prynne, that dream daughter of genius who never actually
lived or died, but who was and is and ever will be. Her grave can be
easily pointed out, but where is that of Alexander, of Themistocles, of
Aristotle, even of the first figure of history--Adam? Mark Twain found
it for a joke. Dr. Hale was finally forced to write a preface to "The
Man Without a Country" to declare that his hero was pure fiction and
that the pathetic punishment so marvelously described was not only
imaginary, but legally and actually impossible. It was because Philip
Nolan had passed into history. I myself have met old men who knew sea
captains that had met this melancholy prisoner at sea and looked upon
him, had even spoken to him upon subjects not prohibited. And these old
men did not hesitate to declare that Dr. Hale had lied in his denial and