In all this, too, there can further be worked out a defence of the historical novel against one of the charges that are sometimes brought up against it. The historical novel is specially open to the temptation of mere picturesqueness. The one thing that is essentially to be kept in mind in the whole idea of history that has been described above, is not that this method of treating the past is shallow, but that it is specially liable to descend to shallowness without knowing and to be satisfied with mere externals, and pageantry, and a veneer of history. Popular literature is full of empty fiction that sets a conventional story in a picturesque background and thinks it has done justice to history when it has clothed its personages in coloured costumes and given their language a touch of the obsolete, and raised up a stage-setting of courts and camps and Gothic architecture; and the drawback to the historical novel lies in the fact that the touch of strangeness, the sense of the far-away, the hint of colour and romance in all these, too often makes the emptiness of the show more tolerable; the fine feathers disguise the worthlessness of the bird below. But if it is remembered that every state of society has its peculiar experience of life, that every age of history shows mankind breaking in upon experience and upon the problems of life at different points, and that each generation has its attitude to existence, and its peculiar synthesis, then it must be seen that the charge of shallowness is not one that can be made against the whole idea of historical novels, and that these, like any other novel, may be rich with experience and may touch human issues. A story that describes a Roman watching the decay of the Empire that he had been taught would endure for ever, and seeing a surging barbarian life flood into its borders like some awful eruption of Nature before which human effort is futile and men can only look helplessly on, may be a mere melodrama, unredeemed by its pageantry and picturesqueness; but it can be more--the story of a unique experience, and of one of the urgent moments in the life of mankind. Shallowness is not the evil of the historical novel--it is only its danger.