of personal things in history, it regards man’s life as a whole and runs his private action and his public conduct into each other, as it ought to do; and it turns the whole into a study of human nature. Even when dealing with an action that seems purely political it will root the action in personality, not merely in politics. Because every public action that was ever taken can be regarded as the private act, the personal decision of somebody, historic events can become materials for the novel, in spite of the fact that public affairs and political matters are not in themselves issues for a novel. The novelist looking at a historic figure sees personality where the scientific historian is tempted to see only the incarnation of a policy. He feels flesh and blood where the ordinary history-reader complains that he is given only abstractions. Every historic decision that comes under his review has for him a context in the mind of the man who made it and not simply in the politics of the day. Behind every great name he sees a human being, with a peculiar experience of life; even if history does not tell of the experience he knows it is there, he thinks it into history and endows the man with it, and he completes the personality in his imagination, bringing in fiction to supply what history fails to give. That is true resurrection, that is the reason why historical novels are full of life and of people, where history is often bloodless and dead. It is evident from all this that there are particular periods and particular problems in history that are specially adapted to this kind of novel-treatment. An age of riotous individualism and of aggressive personalities is more suited to it than one in which corporate action determines events. An age in which war is a game, an orgy of fun and fine fighting, is better than one in which war is an intricate and organised science. A king who governs by whim is more fitting than a politician who is merely the mouthpiece of a party, the servant of organised action. More and more as life increases in complexity and the world becomes organised on impersonal lines, the historical novel that treats of the action of personalities in history and the interaction of private life and public events, must find its course intricate and hard. Ultimately personality counts to-day as much as ever it did in history; it is still the real power, but its influence is not direct, and immediate, and palpable; things perhaps can be traced back to the influence of individuals, but it is an ultimate influence, an influence in the last resort, and it does not show itself on the surface of life. It is fairly true to say that the historical novel, where it deals with politics and public events, must seize upon those periods of history and those phases of life in which personality not only matters in the last resort, but makes an immediate impression and stamps itself directly upon the world. The mental struggle of Charles