story that was hidden beneath a description of Anglo-Norman relations a few generations after the Conquest. Everything in life is full of implied story. Every piece of coal stores up history and a tale of marvel. Parish accounts that tell of a leap in the amount of money spent upon “faggots” in the sixteenth century hold a hidden story of persecution and martyrdom. There is a tragedy that can be read into many a newspaper advertisement, and there are people in the world who can see the adventure and the wandering and the panorama that are locked up in a railway-guide. The geography of Africa that might be a dull recapitulation of facts and figures might be turned into narrative, into a story of travels across an unknown continent. And if a politician wishes to bring home to people the consequences of an unwelcome measure he has only to work out a particular instance of hardship that may result from the measure, giving it preciseness and turning it into a story, and he will catch the imagination of electors far sooner than any logic could convince their intellects. It is in this way that the novelist recasts historical material into story-form, and it is in this way that history is made more effectual than the history-book. Here, then, are the two ways by which history passes into a novel. In the one case it merely gives material that can be woven into story in the same way as a geography-book can be translated into a book of travel; in the other case it provides a story which a writer has to work into his own fictions. The former method is, in a way, organic, since what it prescribes is that a writer shall be true to the life of the past in his inventions; it gives the key in which he must set his tune. According to this, history supplies the metal and the novelist creates the mould. He may invent the characters, the dialogues, the whole range of incident through which it is his aim to make History speak for herself; and he need not distort the characters of actual historical people to fit them into his story, or do violence to the chronological table in order to draw together the threads of his plot. But the second method implies a further fidelity to the facts of the history-book and to the sequence of public events, and it may be called a comparatively “mechanical” method in that it means that a story taken from history has to be dovetailed into the fictions of the novelist; the business is one of adjustment, and sometimes a wrench has to be given to history in order to subdue it to the demands of the novel. And although seldom or never can a historical novel be found in which either of these methods is completely isolated, yet they are two separate things, representing a double set of demands that History makes upon the writer of novels, and they yield some fruitful results if they are regarded separately. Wamba and Gurth are representatives of the one method; and in the same novel Richard I and Robin Hood