The man who does this and can feel at home in a certain “world” of history, who saturates himself with the spirit of an age and breathes its very air, and having touched the life of a time has turned it over in his mind and has played upon it and pondered over it in his thinking--will learn to catch unawares the turns of thought that were current then, will reproduce in a spontaneous way the habits and modes of life of the past--the things he would otherwise have had to copy with servility--and will enter without effort into the very tricks of speech of some former day. Instead of transplanting facts and specific details direct from the history-book into the story-book, he will find expression for the life which he has made his own, letting it blossom out into its own appropriate “facts,” its inevitable manifestations. Atmosphere, though not merely the result of spontaneity, any more than the electricity is the result of the wire, demands this as its necessary concomitant, as electricity demands the completed circuit. Perhaps it may be said that atmosphere is the result of a conspiracy of details that come in an effortless way from a mind that has entered into the experience and made appropriation of the “world,” of some age in history. It belongs to the past age in some sense; but it cannot be separated from the personality of the novelist himself. Charles Lamb steeped his mind in old writers until some of their quaintness and charm passed into himself and came out in his prose style; and in this way he caught history somehow into his personality. Similarly the historical novelist does not merely acquire information about the past, but absorbs it into his mind. Atmosphere comes out in his books as the overflow of a personality that has made a peculiar appropriation of history. It comes as part of the man himself.