ported mediaeval elements into all of
these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and
the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and
peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the
figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine.
And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the
thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state
of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the
middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part
Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of
chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots,
Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding
clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance
to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel"
or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the
nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall;
and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or
a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud.

But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon
the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently
the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of
the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and
G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Merimee, Dumas, Alexis
Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is 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 au