All novelists seem at times to introduce into their works situations and happenings straight from life, or founded upon fact; sometimes things that have been accounted incredible or unnatural in novels, have been defended by authors as having been copied straight from nature. No critic, however, would seriously admit that the appreciation of any novel is at all influenced by a fact like this. The literal truth of an incident is not sufficient justification for its inclusion in a novel, and does not even make its presence in the work more valuable; still less does it affect the worth of the whole novel as a faithful representation of truth. It is clear that the same reasoning must apply to historical episodes incorporated into fiction. The mere inclusion of some actual happening in a story, the attempt to drag in a piece of history and to patch it into a novel, is not justified by the addition of a footnote informing the reader that “This incident actually took place.” The fact may interest a reader, but it is a separate kind of interest that it gives, and it does not affect the total appreciation of the novel as a complete unity. The occasional and arbitrary use of happenings from history, the sending of a few pistol-shots of actual episode into a piece of work, does not alter the character of the whole, and does not give the novel one foot in reality, a root in actual life, any more than Dickens’s use of events from real life brought his novels into closer touch with reality and with truth. Yet there is an important use that can be made of historical incident in fiction, and a more effective way of transferring anecdotes and events from history into the novel. This time the author does not exactly put his finger upon some particular period in history, and work upon that, using the conditions of the time as the hint for story; and does not apply himself specially to a certain wave of popular movement or fix his attention upon particular historical characters; these things he can never ignore, but here they are not his first thought, and it is not around these that his work takes shape; his unit is rather “the thing that actually happened”; his eye is upon the incident, and he works upon that; and the result appears in the existence of a peculiar type of episodical novel, which consists of pieces of story, isolated episodes, loosely strung together upon a thread of fiction, not worked into one another and fused together by fiction; and succeeding one another in such a detached way that sometimes the unity of the whole is very far to seek. The entire novel tends to split up into particular knots of story, one cluster of narrative having perhaps only the most accidental of connections with another, and each being in a way complete in itself.