Amid this wild landscape a wild social order--savage Indians, explorers, _voyageurs_, flaming Jesuits, _habitants_, _grands seigneurs_, soldiers of fortune--Frontenac, Tonty, Dollard, La Salle, Bigot, Montcalm, and perhaps the lost dauphin, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette--and in the heart of it all and the moving force of it all, beautiful women, exiles from France, exquisite maidens educated in convents, charmingly innocent, lithe Indian girls, Indian queens, robust daughters of _habitants_. Swords flash in duel and battle, love rules utterly even such stormy souls as La Salle's, plots with roots that extend even across the ocean into France are worked out in secret fastness--with such material and such background romantic combinations are endless. The strength of Mrs. Catherwood's work lies in its tensity and excitement, its vigor of narrative, its picturesque setting, its power of characterization. From this very element of strength comes a weakness. Romance must tread ever near the verge of the impossible, and at times she pushes her situations too far and falls over into the realm of melodrama. In _The White Islander_, for instance, the Indians have the hero burning at the stake when suddenly Marie, the French "white islander" who loves him, leaps into the circle of flames, declaring that she will die with him. Then realizing there is no hope of saving the two, the Jesuit father unites them in marriage, side by side at the stake, while the flames are crackling, but the moment he pronounces them man and wife the yells of the rescuing party resound from the near forest and they are saved. There is another weakness, one that lies far deeper, one indeed that applies to the whole school of historical novelists that so flourished in the nineties. The author had a passion for "documenting" her romances. She studied her sources as carefully as if she were to write a history; she used all the known facts that could be found; then she supplemented these known facts copiously from her imagination. For her _Romance of Dollard_ she got Parkman to write an introduction commending its historical accuracy; she strewed the chapters with corroborating footnotes; and she tried in all ways to give the impression that it was a genuine piece of history. But there is no evidence that Dollard ever married, and there is not a scrap even of tradition that his bride died with him at the battle of the Long Saut. To make an historical personage like Dollard or La Salle or Tonty the leading, speaking character in a romance is to falsify the facts. Historical romance is not history; it is pure fiction, true only to the spirit of the age and the place represented and to the fundamentals of human character and the ways of the human soul. It should be worked out always with non-historical characters.