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Lord Clare at first smiled at this simple, childish faith, then grew serious, and sitting down on a flowery bank, drew his little daughter on to his knee, and explained to her how the story of fairies was, in the beginning, only a fable of poets and romance-writers, and was now only believed in by ignorant peasants, like her Irish nurse; that, in truth, there were no such beings as the fairies in all the world.

Along the walls were arranged dwarf bookcases, as yet occupied by few books, most of them books of reference, others cheap editions of the French classics in prose no poets, no romance-writers, with a few Latin authors also in prose, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus.

Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very pertinacious creditors.

By 1867, his name was just barely known outside of Russia, for in that year the American diplomat, Eugene Schuyler, in the preface to his translation of "Fathers and Sons," said, "The success of Gogol brought out a large number of romance-writers, who abandoned all imitation of German, French, and English novelists, and have founded a truly national school of romance."

She bade me good-bye, with an ironical nod and disappeared, doubtless to join the countesses of my preface and all the metaphorical creatures, so often employed by romance-writers as agents for the recovery or composition of ancient manuscripts.

This crowding of families, servants, and apprentices, the little space which each took up in the building where the apprentices all slept in one large chamber under the roof, explains the enormous population of Paris then agglomerated on one-tenth of the surface of the present city; also the queer details of private life in the middle ages; also, the contrivances of love which, with all due deference to historians, are found only in the pages of the romance-writers, without whom they would be lost to the world.

The extraordinary motives under which people occasionally act, and the strange things they do under the influence of these motives, frequently so far transcend the bounds of probability, that we romance-writers, with the wholesome fear of the critics before our eyes, would not dare to venture on them.

Our first author who suffered as an astrologer, though it is extremely doubtful whether he was ever guilty of the charges brought against him, was Henry Cornelius Agrippa, who was born at Cologne in 1486, a man of noble birth and learned in Medicine, Law, and Theology. His supposed devotion to necromancy and his adventurous career have made his story a favourite one for romance-writers.

History and romance-writers have consecrated the brown camlet coat, and the breeches of the same stuff, worn by Louis XI. His cap, decorated with leaden medallions, and his collar of the order of Saint-Michel, are not less celebrated; but no writer, no painter has represented the face of that terrible monarch in his last years, a sickly, hollow, yellow and brown face, all the features of which expressed a sour craftiness, a cold sarcasm.