m out I propose to make considerable use of the novels of
different periods.

It is a truism that very little but the dry bones of history can be
learnt from histories.

Nowadays people are sick of reading about more or less immoral monarchs,
and more or less corrupt politicians, and it may be suspected that most
of us have had our bellyful of wars now that the recent contest has come
to an end. What one really wants to learn from history is how the
ordinary folk, like ourselves, were getting on; what their ideas were;
how the world wagged for them. Such information we are much more likely
to get from memoirs and, since such works have been published, from
novels. The novelist is not to be supposed to be committed to acceptance
of all the remarks put into the mouths of his characters, but, if he is
of the second, not to say the first flight (and, if he is not, he is not
worth quoting), his characters and the general tone of his book will not
be out of touch with the times to which they belong. Since the novel
came into existence as something more than an occasional rarity, it is
the novelists and not the players who are "the abstract and brief
chronicles of the times," and it is to them that we shall apply for some
of the information we desire.

To commence with the Georgian period, it is not too much to say that
anything like real religion was scarcely ever at a lower ebb in England.
This is not to say that there was an absolute dearth of religion. Law
wrote his _Serious Call_ during that period, and there are few books of
its kind which have had a greater and more lasting effect. There were
others of like but lesser character than Law, but, on the whole, no one
will deny that the clergy of the Established Church (Catholics were, of
course, in the catacombs) and the religion which they represented were
almost beneath contempt. Look, for example, at _Esmond_, the typical
novel of its period. Is there a single clergyman in it who is not an
object of contempt, with the sole exception of the Jesuit, who, though a
good deal of the stage variety, at least gains a measure of the reader's
sympathy and respect? Thackeray was not himself a Georgian, it may be
urged. That of course is true, but no one that knows Thackeray and knows
also Georgian literature will deny that he was saturated with it and
understood the period with which his book dealt better perhaps than
those who lived in it themselves. But examine the novelists of