Excerpt from The Collected Essays and Papers of George Saintsbury, Vol. 3: 1875 1920
Who wrote the first Historical Novel? The orthodox, and perhaps on the whole the sufficient, answer to this question is, Xenophon. And indeed the Cyrop?dia does in many ways answer to the description of a historical novel better than anything, at least anything extant, before it, and as well as most things for more than two thousand years after it. It is true that even nowadays hardly the most abandoned devotee of the instructive in novels, would begin a book with such a sentence as, "It occurred to us once upon a time how many democracies have come to an end at the hands of those who wished to have some kind of constitution other than a democracy." But perhaps that is only because we are profoundly immoral and sophisticated, while the Greeks were straightforward and sincere. For the very novelist who artfully begins with a scrap of dialogue, or a description of somebody looking over a gate, or a pistol shot, or a sunset, or a tea-party, will, before many pages are turned, plunge you fathoms deeper than ever classical plummet can have sounded in disquisition and dulness. Still, there is no doubt that not merely on this earliest, but on every early example of the kind, there weighed a certain character of amateurishness and novitiate.
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