I do not say that the poet or the novelist must never revert to past history or to historical documents for his topics. His own genius and taste must be his surest guide to both as to topic and to treatment; but I do say that a nation is unfortunate if the builders of its literature invariably draw their material from foreign sources or from the history that was enacted before they were born. "I have no churlish objection," says Emerson in his _Essay on Self-Reliance_, "to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows____ The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, ... he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also." The historical element, therefore, of which I am speaking is not synonymous with the historical novel. The critics apply the term historical novel to those novels that attempt to reproduce the past. These novels are retrospective and essentially romantic. In the work of Sir Walter Scott this form of literature attained its florescence. But I contend that while the historical novel may have a genuinely human interest, its value as history is almost inappreciable as compared with the historical value of the literature that portrays contemporary life. We do not study ancient history in Chaucer's _Legend of Good Women_, but there would be a deplorable gap in our knowledge of fourteenth century England if _The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales_ had never been written. A hundred years from now Dickens' _Tale of Two Cities_ will not have the historical significance that _David Copperfield_ will have; because the _Tale of Two Cities_ is based on records that are accessible to all students of the French Revolution. It is not an interpretation of life at first hand; it is an interpretation only of books. Then, too, historical investigation is even today far more accurate and scientific than when Dickens wrote. But _David Copperfield_, which the critics have never called an historical novel, has an historical element that time cannot take away, for it is the record of what an accurate observer saw and felt and heard in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical novel, therefore, in the current acceptation of the term, contributes nothing to the sources of historical study, though it does popularize history and thus help to prepare an audience for the scientific historian.