; but it should
be remembered that there are some which only attempt to portray human
feelings as affected by the events that such warfare occasioned. 'Old
Mortality' and 'Woodstock' are not controversial tales, and the 'Chaplet
of Pearls' is so quite as little. It only aims at drawing certain scenes
and certain characters as the convulsions of the sixteenth century may
have affected them, and is, in fact, like all historical romance, the
shaping of the conceptions that the imagination must necessarily form
when dwelling upon the records of history. That faculty which might
be called the passive fancy, and might almost be described in Portia's
song,--

'It is engendered in the eyes,
By READING fed--and there it dies,'--

that faculty, I say, has learnt to feed upon character and incident, and
to require that the latter should be effective and exciting. Is it
not reasonable to seek for this in the days when such things were not
infrequent, and did not imply exceptional wickedness or misfortune in
those engaged in them? This seems to me one plea for historical novel,
to which I would add the opportunity that it gives for study of the
times and delineation of characters. Shakespeare's Henry IV. and Henry
V., Scott's Louis XI., Manzoni's Federigo Borromeo, Bulwer's Harold,
James's Philip Augustus, are all real contributions to our comprehension
of the men themselves, by calling the chronicles and memoirs
into action. True, the picture cannot be exact, and is sometimes
distorted--nay, sometimes praiseworthy efforts at correctness in the
detail take away whatever might have been lifelike in the outline.
Yet, acknowledging all this, I must still plead for the tales that
presumptuously deal with days gone by, as enabling the young to realize
history vividly--and, what is still more desirable, requiring an effort
of the mind which to read of modern days does not. The details of
Millais' Inquisition or of his Huguenot may be in error in spite of all
his study and diligence, but they have brought before us for ever the
horrors of the _auto-da-fe_, and the patient, steadfast heroism of the
man who can smile aside his wife's endeavour to make him tacitly betray
his faith to save his life. Surely it is well, by pen as by picture,
to go back to the past for figures that will stir the heart like these,
even though the details be as incorrect as those of the revolt of Liege
or of La Ferrette in 'Quentin