In preparing to compose a fiction founded on history, the writer of these pages thought it no necessary requisite of such a work that the principal characters appearing in it should be drawn from the historical personages of the period. On the contrary, he felt that some very weighty objections attached to this plan of composition. He knew well that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to what was actually known - to fill in with the colouring of romantic fancy the bare outline of historic fact - and thus to place the novelist's fiction in what he could not but consider most unfavourable contrast to the historian's truth.