If the historical novelist regards his duty as being to avoid anachronisms, history will seem to him a chain. The different condition of things existing in the period of which he writes will be a source of labour to him, and a pitfall. But to the true historical novelist they are a glory, they are the whole point of his work, and what was a weakness becomes a strength. If a writer wishes to “work up” a period in order to set a story in it, he will feel history a fetter and every unexpected fact may hamper the story he intended to tell. But if he has steeped his mind in some past age, and has lived in that age, turning it over and over in his imagination, realising the conditions of affairs and the relationships of men and pondering over the implications of these and so recasting the life of the age for himself, then that particular age and those special conditions will suggest their own story, and the historical peculiarities of that age will give point to his novel and will become a power. There is all the difference in the world between a man who has a story to tell and wishes to set it in a past age and to adjust it to the demands of history, and the man who has the past in his head and allows it to come forth in story. There is an immense gulf between the man who works up a period in history in order to tell his story without anachronisms, and a man whose stories come from a mind steeped in the past. In the one case history has to be laboriously gathered up around the story, and it is a burden; in the other case the history is there to begin with, and the story grows out of the history. In the true historical novel the writer has learned to feel at home in the age with which he is dealing. Such a novel comes out of a world of the Past that exists in the writer’s mind. The history that it embodies will be true or inaccurate according as the man has throughout his life built up that world in his mind on true foundations, but in any case that history will come spontaneously; and here the historical novelist is not a novelist working under limitations, but one who has captured new fields of experience and of circumstance and has conquered a new world for his art.