Now, the South has produced her full share of historical novels. From _Horse-Shoe Robinson_ in 1835 to _The Prisoners of Hope_ in 1898, Southern writers have shown themselves by no means insensible to the literary possibilities latent in our colonial and revolutionary history. But it was not until 1870 that the South may be said to have had a school of writers who, while not neglecting the historical novel proper, began to find the scenery and materials of their stories chiefly in local conditions and in passing or remembered events. Much, it is true, has been lost to our literature, but much has been saved. It has often been said that the new movement in Southern literature was due to the influence of Bret Harte's works, but such a statement hardly deserves refutation. The cause lies deeper than this. The events of 1861-65 not only broke the continuity of Southern history but changed forever the social and political status of the Southern states. The past began to loom up strange and remote, but "dear as remembered kisses after death." Men seemed to have lived a quarter of a century in four years. They moved as in a world not realized. Now it is just at such periods that literature finds its opportunity, for at such periods a people's historic consciousness is either deepened or destroyed, and this national consciousness finds expression in historical literature. The South, then, is slowly writing her history in her literature. Hardly a year passes that some new state or some new period does not find a place in the onward movement. Only in the last year, hundreds of readers who care nothing for formal histories have pored over Mr. Page's _Red Rock_ and learned for the first time the inside history of Reconstruction; in the pages of Miss Murfree's _Story of Old Fort Loudon_, they have seen the heroism with which the Tennessee soldier won his state from the wilderness and the Indian; in Miss Grace King's _De Soto and his Men in the Land of Florida_, they have followed the discoverer of the Mississippi on a journey as marvelous and romantic as the fabled voyage of Jason; in _The Kentuckians_ of John Fox, Jr., they have read again of that undying feud between highlander and lowlander that has found expression in more than a hundred English and Scotch ballads; in _Chalmette_ of Mr. Clinton Ross, they have stood again with Jackson on an immortal battlefield; in _The Wire Cutters_ of Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, they have witnessed a hitherto unexplored region, that of West Texas, added to the growing map of Southern literature; in _The Prisoners of Hope_, by Miss Mary Johnston, they have heard the first mutterings of insurrection under the colonial tyranny of Governor Berkeley,--mutterings that a century later were to be reinforced by the pen of Jefferson and the sword of Washington. And these books mark the record of but twelve months.