SOURCE: "Ivanhoe" in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. VI, No. 33, December, 1819, pp. 262-72.

In the following excerpt, an early reviewer describes the plot and characters of Ivanhoe, and praises the complexity and originality of the work.

As this exquisite romance belongs to a class generically different from any of the former tales of the same author, it is possible that many readers, finding it does not tally with any preconceptions they had formed, but requires to be read with a quite new, and much greater effort of imagination, may experience, when it is put into their hands, a feeling not unlike disappointment.¹ In all his former novels the characters, both prominent and subordinate, were such as might have been found in actual existence at no far back period; but the era to which Ivanhoe relates is so remote, that the manners are, of course, unlike any thing either the...