With all faults, native and imposed, Disraeli proclaimed in his novels, in those which were political fairy-tales, as in those which were not, “adventures are to the adventurous;” and this very phrase, too, occurs in his earliest satire. _Contarini Fleming_ was originally styled “The Psychological Romance;” _Alroy_ is undoubtedly a romance historical; _The Young Duke_, a romance of fashion; _Vivian Grey_, one both of fashion and of ambition; _Venetia_, of biography; _Henrietta Temple_, of love; and the rest, romances of the world’s actors and action. But the extraordinary is merely the mantle of romanticism proper. Its method is everything. It is one that brings up before us at once the thing seen and the man seeing. It releases individuality from stereotyped shackles, it transfers interest from achievement to achievement’s atmosphere, and it lends to landscape-painting the same element that it lends to character-drawing. The French separate their terms in distinguishing between real and feigned romance. The one they call _romantique_; the other, _romanesque_. The really romantic in fiction is so to write as to import into the interest of the extraordinary the interest also of the author’s temperament. Both the unusual subject and the imparted atmosphere are requisites. _Rasselas_ is an unusual subject sententiously treated. It is parable, not romance. The _Song of the Shirt_ is an, alas! commonplace theme transfigured by sympathy. It is pathetic, not romantic. Sir Walter Scott, however, is romantic _par excellence_. We are sure that his background is unusual, and he stamps his individuality on the foreground. So, too, with his pictures of scenery. The writer’s heart, rather than his head, pervades the perspective. The unromantic author is a showman, the romantic author an actor. The one fits character to persons; the other from persons evolves character. The romantic reveals the wonderful to us by personal feeling. Ruskin once defined the picturesque as “parasitical sublimity;” Carlyle, too (as romantic and picturesque himself as Ruskin), denounces the faculty in which he excelled. But these thinkers failed, perhaps, to grasp that the root of the most beautiful impressions is association interwoven with memory, fancy, affection, even superstition, and the symbols of very names. Strip Venice of her climate, rob man of his memory, and where is the Venice that Ruskin adored? Absolute beauty does exist, but rarely; and we atone for imperfections by supplementing it with the endearments of outward accident. It is Nature’s own method; she garlands the rift of ruins with her greenery. The dead letter sleeps in literature as in life, of which literature ought to be the most sensitive mirror. Warmth is as indispensable as light; and if fiction is to remain an art and not sink into a false science, the dry bones of hard facts must be made to live. By these means, too, the personal influence of great writers is most practically preserved.