The specialism of modern science has also invaded fiction, and some authors find a county or a parish wide enough for the work of a lifetime. The district has its dialect, and who can reprove it when spoken by the creatures of Mr. Barrie and Mr. Crockett? This kind of fiction is the result of our desire to learn (through novels) about the lives of all sorts and conditions of men. _Enfin_, the whole scope of mortal existence is now the _farrage libelli_ of the novelists who range from prehistoric man to Bethnal Green; from Thrums to Central Africa. There is not the same eagerness to read history, which James II. regarded as “more instructive, and quite as amusing.” My heart is here with King James, and I confess to gaining more entertainment from Carlyle’s _Frederick the Great_ than from most novels. The earlier historians, from Scott to Carlyle, Macaulay and Froude, placed the human interest in the front rank. They conceived that history had to do with human beings of passions, caprices, moods, loves, and hates, dwelling in a world of interesting costumes, arms, architecture, ideas, and beliefs. Thus Carlyle, with much research, created his Cromwell or his Frederick, as Scott created his Queen Mary, his Louis XI., his James VI., or his Cromwell in _Woodstock_, who is not too remote from Carlyle’s. For these reasons Scott, Froude, Carlyle, and Macaulay really are “amusing” as well as instructive historians. When institutions and constitutions had to be described they were placed in separate compartments, as in the works of Hallam and Bishop Stubbs. Historians studied manuscripts, of course, but it was not held that only the unprinted was the valuable, that a new survey of known matter was absolutely valueless.