Historical fiction of the late nineteenth century was characteristically romance of the cloak-and-sword school, and perhaps no author's work typified this form as well as the stories and novels of Stanley J. Weyman, called "the prince of romantic novelists" by The Cornhill Magazine. Weyman's work was widely read not only in England and the United States, but also in countries such as France and Russia. A throwback to simpler times, his swashbuckling adventure stories offered readers an escape from the uncertainties of a society that was becoming increasingly complicated as it entered the twentieth century. Along with writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, and Joseph Conrad, Weyman contributed to the general vogue of adventure fiction during the years 1880-1914, but unlike them, he is now relatively unknown. Although his renown failed to outlive the decline in the popularity of...