But whereas you may be nearly as well acquainted with the actual history of the time as the pedants themselves, and a great deal better acquainted with its literature, and yet never be shocked, disgusted, or contemptuously amused in Ivanhoe by such things as were quoted from the Peep a few pages back—­so, to those who know something of “the old Elizabeth way,” and even nowadays to those who know very little, and that little at second hand, Miss Lee’s travesty of it in The Recess is impossible and intolerable.  When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about “the Parisian opera,” represents a French girl of the sixteenth century as being “instructed in the English poets,” and talks about driving in a “landau,” the individual blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott’s Ulrica is apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not long before the reign of Richard I. But this last oversight does not affect the credibility of the story, or the homogeneity of the manners, in the least.  Mrs. Radcliffe jumbles up two (or more than two) utterly different states and stages of society, manners, and other things which constitute the very atmosphere of the story itself.  Perhaps (we have very few easy conversations of the period to justify a positive statement) a real Bois-Guilbert and still more a real Wamba might not have talked exactly like Scott’s personages:  but there is no insistent and disturbing reason why they should not.  When we hear an Adelaise of the mid-twelfth century asking whether she does not receive her education from her mamma, the necessary “suspension of disbelief” becomes impossible.

But these now most obvious truths were not obvious at all between 1780 and 1810:  and it is perhaps the greatest evidence of Scott’s genius that half, but by no means quite, unconsciously he saw them, and that he has made everybody see them since.  It was undoubtedly fortunate that he began novel-writing so late:  for earlier even he might have been caught in the errors of the time.  But when he did begin, he had not only reached middle life and matured his considerable original critical faculty—­criticism and wine are the only things that even the “kind calm years” may be absolutely trusted to improve if there is any original goodness in them—­but he had other advantages.  He had read, if not with minute accuracy, very widely indeed:  and he possessed, as Lord Morley has well said, “the genius of history” in a degree which perhaps no merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded in quality even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon.  He had an almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters.  He had shown himself to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in half a dozen