A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales: (Timeless Classic Books)

I think many will be surprised to find how large a proportion of our best writers (English and American) have entered the domain of Historical or Semi-Historical Romance. Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Char-lotte Bronte, George Meredith, R. L. Stevenson, Hawthorne, Peacock, Charles Kingsley, Henry Kingsley, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, Walter Besant, Lytton, Disraeli, J. H. Newman, J. A. Froude, and Walter Pater—these are a few of the names which appear in the following pages; while Tolstoy, Dumas, Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, De Vigny, Prosper Merimee, Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, Freytag, Scheffel, Hauff, Auerbach, Manzoni, Perez Galdos, Merejkowski, Topelius, Sienkiewicz, and Jokai are, perhaps, the chief amongst those representing Literatures other than our own. "The Last Days of Pompeii," "The Gladiators," "Hypatia," "Harold," "Ivan-hoe," "The Talisman," "Maid Marian," "The Last of the Barons," "Quentin Durward," "Romola," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "The Palace of the King," "Westward Ho!", "Kenilworth," "The Chaplet of Pearls," "A Gentle-man of France," "John Inglesant," "The Three Musketeers," "Twenty Years After," "Woodstock," "Peveril of the Peak," "Old Mortality," " The Betrothed Lovers" ("I Promessi Sposi"), "Lorna Doone," "The Refugees," "In the Golden Days," "The Courtship of Morice Buckler," "Dorothy Forster," "The Men of the Moss Hags," "Esmond," "The Virginians," "Heart of Midlothian," "Waverley," "The Master of Ballantrae," "Kidnapped," "Catriona," "The Chaplain of the Fleet," "The Seats of the Mighty," "Barnaby Rudge," "A Tale of Two Cities," "War and Peace"—what visions do these mere titles arouse within many of us!