This meagre list of the more important productions of the academic school clearly reveals the attraction of the American theme for the present American historian. Capable and impressive studies of foreign subjects there have been, it is true;--David Jayne Hill’s “History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe” and Henry C. Lea’s work on the medieval church are conspicuous instances;--but the great mass of research and writing has been gathered at home. Governmental affairs and political events loom large. Less interest has been taken in the subtler phases of national character and individual motive; although Fiske and McMaster and Woodrow Wilson and certain of the best biographers (whose important service to literature deserves separate consideration) represent a current tendency toward reflective and philosophical writing of a literary quality, which augurs well for the future of American historiography. II. THE NOVELISTS =The Beginnings.=--American fiction was one of the latest types of native literature to appear. The hard conditions of life imposed on the colonists by the necessity of clearing the forests and keeping the Indians in check were evidently unfavourable to sustained efforts in imaginative writing. And there were other reasons for the late growth of the novel. Except as they had a religious turn or an evident moral, stories were likely to be looked upon by the Puritans as a species of useless frivolity, which could have no part in the saving of souls.[3] Again, in the struggle with the mother country the robust and scholarly intellects of America had other matters to think of besides the elements of pure literature. The rights of man, the basis of resistance to tyranny, the principles of statecraft, the elements of democracy, were among the interests that absorbed the Washingtons, the Otises, and the Hamiltons of the latter part of the eighteenth century. But perhaps the most important reason for the tardy appearance of American fiction was the lack of tradition and legend. Of this Hawthorne complained as late as 1859, in the preface to “The Marble Faun”: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers need ruin to make them grow.