_Quentin Durward_, which is all but
amongst the best, runs back farther still, far into the previous
century, while _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_, though not among the
greatest of Scott's works, carry us back more than five hundred years.
The new class of extempore novel writers, though more considerable
than, sixty years ago, any one could have expected ever to see it, is
still limited, and on any high level of merit will probably always be
limited, to the delineation of the times of which the narrator has
personal experience. Scott seemed to have had something very like
personal experience of a few centuries at least, judging by the ease
and freshness with which he poured out his stories of these centuries,
and though no one can pretend that even he could describe the period
of the Tudors as Miss Austen described the country parsons and squires
of George the Third's reign, or as Mr. Trollope describes the
politicians and hunting-men of Queen Victoria's, it is nevertheless
the evidence of a greater imagination to make us live so familiarly as
Scott does amidst the political and religious controversies of two or
three centuries' duration, to be the actual witnesses, as it were, of
Margaret of Anjou's throes of vain ambition, and Mary Stuart's
fascinating remorse, and Elizabeth's domineering and jealous
balancings of noble against noble, of James the First's shrewd
pedantries, and the Regent Murray's large forethought, of the politic
craft of Argyle, the courtly ruthlessness of Claverhouse, and the
high-bred clemency of Monmouth, than to reflect in countless
modifications the freaks, figures, and fashions of our own time.
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