The characteristics of the Novel proper as a specific kind of fiction have been already indicated and illustrated in this study:  we have seen that it is a picture of real life in a setting of to-day:  the romance, which is Scott’s business, is distinguished from this in its use of past time and historic personages, its heightening of effect by the introducing of the exceptional in scene and character, its general higher color in the conductment of the narrative:  and above all, its emphasis upon the larger, nobler, more inspiring aspects of humanity.  This, be it understood, is the romance of modern times, not the elder romance which was irresponsible in its picture of life, falsely idealistic.  When Sir Walter began his fiction, the trend of the English Novel inheriting the method and purpose of Richardson, was away from the romantic in this sense.  The analysis given has, it may be hoped, made this plain.  It was by the sheer force of his creative gift, therefore, that Scott set the fashion for the romance in fiction:  aided though he doubtless was by the general romanticism introduced by the greater English poets and expressive of the movement in literature towards freedom, which followed the French Revolution.  That Scott at this time gave the fiction an impulse not in the central flow of development is shown in the fact of its rapid decadence after he passed away.  While the romance is thus a different thing from the Novel, modern fiction is close woven of the two strands of realism and romance, and a comprehensive study must have both in mind.  Even authors like Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, who are to be regarded as stalwart realists, could not avoid a single sally each into romance, with “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Henry Osmond” and “Romola”; and on the other hand, romanticists like Hawthorne and Stevenson have used the methods and manner of the realist, giving their loftiest flights the most solid groundwork of psychologic reality.  It must always be borne in mind that there is a romantic way of dealing with fact:  that a novel of contemporary society which implies its more exceptional possibilities and gives due regard to the symbol behind every so-called fact, can be, in a good sense, romantic.  Surely, that is a more acceptable use of the realistic formula which, by the exercise of an imaginative grasp of history, makes alive and veritable for us some hitherto unrealized person or by-gone epoch.  Scott is thus a romanticist because he gave the romantic implications of reality:  and is a novelist in that broader, better definition of the word which admits it to be the novelist’s business to portray social humanity, past or present, by means of a unified, progressive prose narrative.  Scott, although he takes advantage of the romancer’s privilege of a free use of the historic past, the presentation of its heroic episodes and spectacular events, is a novelist, after all, because he deals with the recognizably human, not with the grotesque, supernatural, impossible.