The simplest form of treatment that can be given to history in the novel is that of the story in which the hero travels a bygone age, and the reader follows him as into a new world and peeps over his shoulder to see what he sees. The age, the whole scheme of things as it then existed, is described in the adventures of the wanderer and at its point of contact with an individual life. This happens to some extent in every historical novel. Apart from any conscious description of the background of his story the novelist must always be betraying the peculiar conditions of a particular century, since the fate and fortunes of the actors in his drama are the result of their entanglement in the affairs of the time and in the system of things of the particular moment. But in a work like _The Cloister and the Hearth_ all this is raised into a method and is the way adopted for making history betray itself; the wanderings of the hero make the book pre-eminently a descriptive one, and the fact that the novel is rather a chain of incident than the working out of a particular process of action, makes the world of the story more important than the plot. The hardships of Gerard at strange inns, his illnesses, the brawls in the countryside, the companions whom he meets, and the steps in his career are simply the means by which the age manifests its character, and in them history is speaking. There can be no simpler example than this of the translation of history into story. In so far as this method of treating the past is followed in _The Cloister and the Hearth_ or in any novel, it means that an age is regarded as a set of conditions, a system of things, that is looked upon as static and is described at its points of contact with an individual life set in it and, so to speak, entangled in its network. That individual may be the creation of the novelist and his chain of adventures may be pure invention. His life is a candle that lights up corners of his age as it is brought into them, and the places at which he touches his age and runs up against the characteristic circumstances of his time, his points of contact with the machinery of society, may be ideally chosen to show up the character of his time. His life may then sum up his age in a way in which no actual individual life that is ever lived can in itself sum up the peculiar conditions of the age in which it is set. In _The Cloister and the Hearth_, at any rate, a century is fixed for us as a picture, as a static thing. The cinematograph-film of history is stopped there, and one particular photograph on the reel is projected into the book. All this, however, is elaborated when the set of conditions to be described is regarded not as a static thing, but as dynamic. _Barnaby Rudge_, by reason of its very faults, perhaps more than by virtue of any greatness, is an example well calculated to illustrate this point.