He knew well
that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to what was
actually known--to fill in with the colouring of romantic fancy the bare
outline of historic fact--and thus to place the novelist's fiction in
what he could not but consider most unfavourable contrast to the
historian's truth. He was further by no means convinced that any story
in which historical characters supplied the main agents, could be
preserved in its fit unity of design and restrained within its due
limits of development, without some falsification or confusion of
historical dates--a species of poetical licence of which he felt no
disposition to avail himself, as it was his main anxiety to make his
plot invariably arise and proceed out of the great events of the era
exactly in the order in which they occurred.
Influenced, therefore, by these considerations, he thought that by
forming all his principal characters from imagination, he should be able
to mould them as he pleased to the main necessities of the story; to
display them, without any impropriety, as influenced in whatever manner
appeared most strikingly interesting by its minor incidents; and
further, to make them, on all occasions, without trammel or hindrance,
the practical exponents of the spirit of the age, of all the various
historical illustrations of the period, which the Author's researches
among conflicting but equally important authorities had enabled him to
garner up, while, at the same time, the appearance of verisimilitude
necessary to an historical romance might, he imagined, be successfully
preserved by the occasional introduction of the living characters of the
era, in those portions of the plot comprising events with which they had
been remarkably connected.
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