ABSTRACT
There is, indeed, a kind of antiquarian rather than historical novel, which can scarcely be named in connexion with Mr. Thackeray’s works, but which is sometimes successful in its small way. We mean such books as Bekker’s Charicles and Gallus, where the sole object is to ‘cram’ us with antiquities, and the characters and incidents are only so many pegs whereon the contents of Adams and Potter may be hung.1
Such novels are to be classed, not with works of imagination, but with historical games and geographic puzzles and the other miscuit utile dulci2
