This kind of novel can only come from a history rich with the right kind of episodes. It would seem that there are certain periods in the world’s story, and in this case the Renaissance would be assuredly one, and there are certain countries and localities like the Hungary that Jokai depicted and the Highlands of Scotland, which are peculiarly favourable to this method of treating history in fiction, since they appear to throw out their history in the form of episodes that ask to be turned into story. When life is adventurous and full of colour and crowded with striking incident, when, against a romantic background, there is the assertion of vigorous personality, resulting in novel turns of action, and exciting combinations of circumstance; and, above all, when these are the kind of things that are remembered in story and tradition and song, so that history is a store of incidents, and a tale of exploits and intrigues and adventures rather than a mere narrative of social development and public events, then the _raconteur_ must find this history a treasure-store of materials for a historical novel that shall be a succession of brilliant episodes rather than the working-out of some great theme, some large process. The by-ways of history, too, the dusty corners of the past, away from the main course of broad political movement and public event, are lit up by out-of-the-way incidents and stories that the history of history-books misses in its wide sweep; and these, although rooted in fact, are things that a story-teller would love to have invented, and they ask to be re-told in fiction. This, then, is the field of the novel of historical episodes. In faults as well as in virtues many of the books of Jokai are striking illustrations of the form; but many novelists have adopted it with some variations; and even a book like Merejkowski’s _Forerunner_, in spite of its unity in the character of Leonardo and in the spirit of Renaissance, is only an example of this way of treating episodes; it may work them into a finer whole, and centralise the interest of the reader, and send one great idea throbbing through each; but it can scarcely avoid taking shape before the eyes of the reader as a series of fine flashes of incident, each in a way self-contained, and finding their connection more in the fabrications of the novelist than in the fabric of real history.