He was but half-satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess with the knife-grinder “Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,” he would laugh and say “then let us make one--nothing so easy as to make a tradition.” Such a story invented around a place, such an attempt to call up history out of a scene, is really an act of homage, an offering made to the place, a work of dedication. History is rooted in geography, and the historical novel, which is a novel that seeks to be rooted in some ways in actuality, finds one of its roots in geography. The quotation made above from Scott’s Introduction to _The Monastery_ is part of an explanation which the author gives of the reason why he chose the celebrated ruins of Melrose as the scene of his story, although he described the place as “possessing less of romantic beauty than some other scenes in Scotland.” Of Jokai it has been said “The world around him--Hungary, Russia, and Turkey--breathed more romance and imagination than did the Highlands to Scott or France to Dumas”; and here was the inspiration of the writer. Historical novels are born of romanticism of a kind; but they are a romancing around objects and places; they have a basis in reality, and their roots in the soil. In this way there is something more firm about them than is found in the more vague and dreamy products of romanticism--those dim romances of some undefined no-time, no-place, which have a “stained-glass window” vision of a mediaeval past and lack the link with earth, and can only be connected with the historical novel in the way a fairy-story can, that is by the remote suggestion of the past that is contained in the airy words “Once upon a time.” And if in the historical novel there is devotion to locality and a feeling for the history that breathes through the soil, all this comes out large and most complete where geography and tradition, love of place and pride in its heritage of story, combine in patriotism. Patriotism that so often rings false is in this true, in that it becomes the consciousness of belonging to a place and a tradition. Even where it seems most local and confined, even where it contains no sounding of the trumpets of nationalism, and where its author holds no patriotic motive, the historical novel cannot help reminding men of their heritage in the soil. It is often born of a kind of patriotism; it can scarcely avoid always being the inspiration of it. In this way it becomes itself a power in history, an impulse to fine feeling, and a source of more of the action and heroism which it describes. The historical novel itself becomes a maker of history. II