This excellent kind, however, had been wandering about in the wilderness—­had indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had been a mere “bodiless childful of life in the gloom”—­for more than two thousand years before Waverley.  Of its earlier attempts to get into full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now due.  It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and verse, which often attempted historic, and almost always pseudo-historic, guise.  As has been seen in regard to such collections as Croxall’s, historical stories were freely mingled with fictitious:  and it could not be for nothing that Horace Walpole, the author of the Castle of Otranto, was a rather ardent and even to some extent scholarly student of the romance and the gossip of history.  Much earlier, Fielding himself, in his salad days, had given something of an historic turn to the story of A Journey from this World to the Next.  And when history itself became more common and more readable, it could not but be that this inexhaustible source of material for the new kind of literature, which was being so eagerly demanded and so busily supplied, should suggest itself.  Some instances of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century experiments have been given and discussed in the last chapter:  and when Scott (or “the Author of Waverley”) had achieved his astonishing success, some of the writers of these put in the usual claim of “That’s my thunder.”  This was done in the case of the Lees, it was also done in the case of Jane Porter, the writer of the once famous and favourite Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and Scottish Chiefs (1810):  while, as we have seen, there had been historical colour enough in Godwin’s novels to make suggestion of his “authorship of Waverley” not absolutely preposterous.  Even Mrs. Radcliffe had touched the style; and humbler persons like the egregious Henrietta Mosse had attempted it in the most serious spirit.

[18] Those who are curious about the matter will find it treated in a set of Essays by the present writer, which originally appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine during the autumn of 1894, and were reprinted among Essays in English Literature, Second Series, London, 1895.

But with their varying degrees of talent—­with, in one or two cases, even a little genius—­all these writers had broken themselves upon one fatal difficulty—­that of anachronism:  not in the petty sense of the pedant, but in the wide one of the critic.  The present writer is not prepared, without reading A Peep at Our Ancestors again (which he distinctly declines to do), to say that there are, in that remarkable performance, any positive errors of historic fact worse than, or as bad, as those which pedantry has pointed out in Ivanhoe.