faculty; and he is liable to
be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
non-appearance in England of the _vates sacer_; for Tolstoi has shown
us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the
Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.

This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
present moment. S