Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
https://books.google.com/books?id=3LFEAAAAYAAJ(the University of VirginiA)
2. Chapters misnumbered going from III. to V.
The Introduction is written by Laurie Magnus, M.A.; the Title-pageis designed by Ivor I. J. Symes.
George Payne Rainsford James, Historiographer Royal to King WilliamIV., was born in London in the first year of the nineteenth century,and died at Venice in 1860. His comparatively short life wasexceptionally full and active. He was historian, politician andtraveller, the reputed author of upwards of a hundred novels, thecompiler and editor of nearly half as many volumes of letters,memoirs, and biographies, a poet and a pamphleteer, and, during thelast ten years of his life, British Consul successively inMassachusetts, Norfolk (Virginia), and Venice. He was on terms offriendship with most of the eminent men of his day. Scott, on whosestyle he founded his own, encouraged him to persevere in his career asa novelist; Washington Irving admired him, and Walter Savage Landorcomposed an epitaph to his memory. He achieved the distinction ofbeing twice burlesqued by Thackeray, and two columns are devoted to anaccount of him in the new "Dictionary of National Biography." Eachgeneration follows its own gods, and G. P. R. James was, perhaps, tooprolific an author to maintain the popularity which made him "in someways the most successful novelist of his time." But his work bearsselection and revival. It possesses the qualities of seriousness andinterest; his best historical novels are faithful in setting and freein movement. His narrative is clear, his history conscientious, andhis plots are well-conceived. English learning and literature areenriched by the work of this writer, who made vivid every epoch in theworld's history by the charm of his romance.
"The Man at Arms" tells the story of Jarnac and Moncontour, and endswith the fatal day of St. Bartholomew. "Henry of Guise" takes up thehistory of the Religious Wars, with sympathy chiefly for theCatholics, and closes with the assassination of that great soldier;then "One in a Thousand" resumes the tale just before the murder ofHenry III. and the battle of Ivry. The two former are rather short andremarkably brisk in movement, this one is somewhat longer and muchmore elaborate. It has a complex plot, a large crowd of charactersfrom both factious, and has evidently been worked out with, perhaps,less vivacity but more pains. "Willingly" says the novelist, "we turnonce more from the dull, dry page of history ... to the moreentertaining and instructive accidents and adventures of theindividual characters which, with somewhat less skill than that of aPhilidore, we have been moving about on the little chess-board beforeus." There is an ironical undermeaning here; but so far as Jamessuggests that his flagrant romanticism, mysterious dwar