c with a greater love of
things than of men, yet not the things of nature as much as things
made by men. His portrayal of landscape may be fine prose, but
contains no pure feeling of poetry in it, while, in the town, in the
house, in the street, wherever the human mind and hand have left their
imprints, his language grows warm, his fancy swoops and grasps the
significance of detail; these dumb survivals of the past become
eloquent to his ears; his eyes discover in them a reflecting retina
which, obedient to his command, resuscitates former contacts, a world
buried and now found again. When attempting the historical novel, in
which his persons are typical rather than individual, he still
preserves this exactitude of local colouring. His descriptions of
places, in fact, in all his books are almost photographs, and, where
change has been slow, still serve to guide the curious traveller.

In his preface to the _Cabinet of Antiques_, he explains how he
dealt with his raw material. A young man has been prosecuted before
the Assize Court, and had been condemned and branded. This case he
connected with the story of an ancient family fallen from its high
estate and dwelling in provincial surroundings. The story had
dramatic elements in it, but less intensely dramatic than those of
the young man's case. "This way of proceeding," he says, "should be
that of an historian of manners and morals. His task consists in
blending analogous facts in a single picture. Is he not rather bound
to give the spirit than the letter of the happenings? He synthesizes
them. Often it is necessary to pick out several similar characters
in order to succeed in making up one, just as odd people are met with
who are so ridiculous that two distinct persons may be created out of
them. . . . . Literature uses a means employed in painting, which, to
obtain a fine figure, adapts the hands of one model, the foot of
another, the chest of a third, the shoulders of a fourth."

The foregoing quotation raises the question of the significance of the
term truth as applied to fiction. Evidently, it cannot have the same
meaning as when applied to history or biography. In the latter, the
writer invents neither circumstances nor actions, nor the persons
engaged in them, but seeks to know the whole of the first two exactly
as they occurred, and to interpret, as nearly to life as may be, the
third. However, if he be a philosopher, he will perhaps try to show
the intimate r