If naturalism was a reaction from the small beer of local color, so, in another fashion, was the flare-up of romance which attended and succeeded the Spanish War. History was suddenly discovered to be wonderful no less than humble life; and so was adventure in the difficult quarters of the earth. That curious, that lush episode of fiction endowed American literature with a phalanx of "best sellers" some of which still continue to be sold, in diminished numbers; and it endowed the national tradition with a host of gallant personages and heroic incidents dug up out of old books or brought back from far quests by land or water. It remains, however, an episode; the rococo romancers did not last. Almost without exception they turned to other methods as the romantic mood faded out of the populace. Of those who had employed history for their substance only James Branch Cabell remained absolutely faithful, revising, strengthening, deepening his art with irony and beauty until it became an art exquisitely peculiar to himself. Mary Johnston was as faithful, but her fidelity had less growth in it. Originally attracted to the heroic legend of colonial Virginia, she has since so far departed from it as to produce in the _Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ a wide panorama of the Civil War, in other books to study the historic plight and current unrest of women, and here and there to show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a poet, agreeably rather than creatively.