Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond” is an admirable example of a good historical novel, when carefully and conscientiously written by a man of rare gifts and of a rarer honesty. No reader of this tale of the times of Queen Anne could fail to derive from it such impressions of the state of manners and of morals in the higher circles, as well as of the political jealousies and the religious feuds which divided men of all classes, as no formal history could possibly convey—such as even the most abundant and painstaking research into the less accessible resources of historical knowledge would fail to impart to a man of feeble capacity to picture and recombine. The service is not a slight one which is rendered to the world when such a painstaking explorer of historical truth as Thackeray gathers his materials with faithful and laborious research, and weaves them together into so fascinating and instructive a story. But this tale, marvelous as it is for its elaborated truthfulness and picturesque effects, strikingly illustrates the possible dangers and disadvantages to which the historical novel may be abused. Thackeray was not without his prejudices. These, with his desire for producing striking effects, are manifest in the occasional _overdrawing_ of this generally well-balanced representation of one of the most interesting periods of English history. It is notorious that Walter Scott gave very serious offense to multitudes of his admiring readers by some of his portraitures of the representative characters of the great historical parties of Scotland and England. With all the good sense and candor which he had at command, his sympathies were too intense and his prejudices too tenacious to allow him to write otherwise than he did, though he know he should excite the indignation of thousands of his fervid countrymen. Mrs. H. B. Stowe says in the preface to her recent historical romance, “Oldtown Folks:” “I have tried to make my mind as still as a looking-glass or a mountain lake, and thus to give you merely the images reflected therein.” But a fervid and sympathetic nature like hers can no more free itself from a theological or personal bias in representing the New England of the past, over which she has laughed, and wept, and speculated, and struggled all her life, than the “mountain lake” can hold itself in glassy smoothness against the gusts and breezes that sweep upon it from the heights above.