The tidal wave of historical romance which toward the end of the past century attacked this coast and broke so far inland as to inundate the entire continent swept Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of popularity to which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by the exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic than those which first lifted him above the flood.  He came during a moment of national expansiveness.  Patriotism and jingoism, altruism and imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook the temper which had been slowly stiffening since the Civil War.  Now, with a rush of unaccustomed emotions, the national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating in it, not to say wallowing in it.

In Mr. Churchill it found a romancer full of consolation to any who might fear or suspect that the country’s history did not quite match its destiny.  He had enough erudition to lend a very considerable “thickness” to his scene, whether it was Annapolis or St. Louis or Kentucky or upland New England.  He had a sense for the general bearings of this or that epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future implied and adumbrated by this past; he had a feeling for the ceremonial in all eminent occasions.  He had, too, a knack at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in which his contemporaries believed their forebears had expressed themselves.  And he had, besides all these qualities needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral earnestness which imparted to them the look of moral significance.  Richard Carvel by the exercise of simple Maryland virtues rises above the enervate young sparks of Mayfair; Stephen Brice in The Crisis by his simple Yankee virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels—­who, however, are gallant and noble though misguided men; canny David Ritchie in The Crossing leads the frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of fable leads the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in Coniston, though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and consequently of constituents, surrenders his ugly power at the touch of a maiden’s hand.

To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color and moral earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill owes to the elements injected into American life by Theodore Roosevelt.  Is not The Crossing—­to take specific illustrations—­connected with the same central cycle as The Winning of the West?  Is not Coniston, whatever the date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption which Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negligence and against which he urged the duty of an awakened civic conscience?  In time Mr. Churchill was to extend his inquiries to regions of speculation into which Roosevelt never ventured, but as regards American history and American politics they were of one mind.  “Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama and the Canal,” wrote Mr.