cceeded. In the first place, until the eighteenth century was
pretty far advanced, the conception and the knowledge of history as
distinguished from the mere writing and reading of chronicles had been
in a very rudimentary condition. Exceedingly few historians and no
readers of history, as a class and as a rule, had practised or acquired
the art of looking at bygone ages with any attempt to realise and revive
the ideas of those ages themselves, or even, while looking at them with
the eyes of the present, to keep in mind that these were quite different
eyes from those of contemporaries. In the same way no attempt at getting
"local colour," at appropriateness of dialect, and so forth, had been
made. These negligences in the hands of genius had been as unimportant
as the negligences of genius always are. If Shakespeare's "godlike
Romans" are not entirely free from anachronism, nobody of sense would
exchange them for anything else than themselves; and though Dante
practically repeated in the _Commedia_ the curious confusion which in
less gifted _trouveres_ and romances mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne
and blended Greek and Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this
also was supremely unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting. But
when, at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary powers
at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeavoured to write
historical novels, they all, from Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss
Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the merest gallimaufries of inaccurate
history, questionable fiction, manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all
dialogue destitute of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and
drawn chiefly from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the
time.

It is not possible--it never is in such cases--to give a very exact
account of the causes which led Walter Scott, when the public seemed to
be a little tiring of the verse-romances which have been discussed in
the last chapter, to take to romances in prose. The example of Miss
Edgeworth, if a true cause at all, could affect only his selection of
Scotch manners to illustrate his histories, not his adoption of the
historical style itself. But he did adopt it; and, fishing out from an
old desk the beginnings of a story which he had left unfinished, or
rather had scarce commenced, years earlier, he fashioned it into
_Waverley_. This appearing in the year 1814 at a serious crisis in his
own affair