non-historical novelist can dispense as little as his brother the
historical--was that "genius of history" with which Lord Morley--a
critic not likely to be misled by sympathy in some respects at any
rate--has justly credited him. For unless you have this "historic
sense," as it has been more generally and perhaps better termed (though
to the intense disgust of some professed historians), it is not only
impossible for you to delineate scene and character at a distance from
your time, but you become really disqualified for depicting your own
time itself. You fail to distinguish the temporary from the permanent;
you achieve perhaps a fairly faithful copy of actual manners and
fashions, but you do nothing more, and as the subject dies so does the
picture. Contrast Hook, say, with Thackeray, and the difference will
emerge at once.

Secondly, Scott had, besides this historic sense and the relish for
humanity which must accompany it, a knowledge of literature with which
he has been too seldom credited to the full. When he published
_Waverley_ he had been reading all sorts and conditions of books for
some five-and-thirty years, and assimilating them if, as the pedants
will have it, with a distressing inaccuracy in particulars, with a
general and genial fidelity of which the pedants do not even dream and
could not comprehend, or they would not be pedants. He was thus
furnished with infinite stores of illustrative matter, never to
overpower, but always to accompany and season, his knowledge of life. In
a few instances this felicity of adoption has been recognised, but not a
tenth part of it has ever been systematically put on record. The more
widely and the longer a man reads, the more constantly will he find that
Scott has been before him, and has "lifted" just the touch that he
wanted at the time and in the place.