Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important one.  Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction.  In a sense both sayings are true.  Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology.  But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy.  It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination.  The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life.  Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas.  Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life.  Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle.  “These historical novels,” testifies Carlyle, “have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. . . .  It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him.” [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were Scott’s professed disciples.  The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that “Ivanhoe” was the inspirer of his “Conquete d’Angleterre,” and styles the novelist “le plus grand maitre qu’il y ait jamais eu en fait de divination historique.” [45]

Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more particularly, their military side.  He exhibits their large, showy aspects:  battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46] sieges, and the like.  The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells.  But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him.  Into its spiritualities he did not penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering faiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms, asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of hell, and visions of paradise.  It was the literature of the knight, not of the monk, that appealed to him.  He felt the awfulness and the beauty of Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual.  The externalities of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in its ceremonies or august in its power.  He pictured effectively such scenes as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the “Lay”; the immuring of the renegade nun in “Marmion”; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of the Temple in “Ivanhoe.”  Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages, jolly friars, holy hermits,