he Days of Nero_
(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
Fiction. In his preface he tells us that

'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
(Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
Seneca and the elder Pliny.'

Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
romance.

We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
Adventure.

It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
considerable degree pol