potent yet.  English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for “Romola,” “Hypatia,” “Henry Esmond,” and “The Cloister and the Hearth.”  In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive.  “Waverley” is not only vastly superior to “Thaddeus of Warsaw” (1803) and “The Scottish Chiefs” (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31.  The earlier numbers of the series, “Waverley,” “Guy Mannering,” “The Antiquary,” “Old Mortality,” “The Black Dwarf,” “Rob Roy,” “The Heart of Mid-Lothian,” “The Bride of Lammermoor,” and “A Legend of Montrose,” were Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In “Ivanhoe” (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to the twelfth century for his period.  Thenceforth he ranged over a wide region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward” and “Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris,” “The Betrothed,” and “The Talisman”) in the age of the Crusades.  The fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in “Woodstock,” “The Fortunes of Nigel,” “The Monastery,” and its sequel, “The Abbot.”  He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, “something very like personal experience of a few centuries.”

Scott’s formula for the construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors.  His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary.  Richard I. is not the hero of “Ivanhoe,” nor Louis XI. of “Quentin Durward.”  Shakspere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it.  Still it is history, the private story is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations.  Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that “in the work of the latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . .  It is curious enough to think that ‘Tom Jones’ is laid in the year ’45, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers in his hero’s way.” [35] And it is this background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott—­the leading impression; the broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of an extinct society.  This he was able to give with seeming ease and without any appearance of “cram.”  Chronicle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes.  In his comments on “Queenhoo Hall” he adverts to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his “Journal” (October 18th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators:  “They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge.  I write because I have long since read such works and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for.  This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute description of events which do not affect its progress.”